WASHINGTON — One year after giving a whiplash-inducing revision to revenue forecasts from growth to contraction, French satellite operator Eutelsat hit the markers it set out for a return to growth by 2019.

Speaking to investors July 28, Eutelsat CEO Rodolphe Belmer said the operator’s strategy to curb costs and increase free cash flow are working effectively, reinforced by contract renewals with major broadcasters Arqiva in the United Kingdom and Digiturk in Turkey that both came with “favorable terms.”

Those contracts, plus an uptake in transponder-hungry high definition channels at a pace that surpasses the adoption of bandwidth-saving video compression standards, backed Eutelsat’s stance that video, its largest customer set, will remain a dependable source of revenue as the operator gears up for new long term opportunities in satellite broadband.

Eutelsat reported 1.478 billion euros ($1.75 billion) in revenue for its fiscal year 2016/2017, which ended June 30, a decrease of 2.2 percent from the previous fiscal year. That is squarely in the middle of the company’s expected decline of 1 to 3 percent announced in May of 2016, when the company reversed prior projections of 4 to 6 percent growth.

Discretionary free cash flow increased by 65 percent to 407.8 million euros, and capital expenditures, or capex, decreased year-over-year by 100 million euros to 414 million euros. Belmer said the company would target 420 million euros in capex for fiscal year 2017/2018, and would extend that goal for the following fiscal year.

Eutelsat’s EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, stood at 1.134 billion, down by 2.7 percent. Net income increased by 0.9 percent to 352 million euros, but the company’s backlog declined by 7.6 percent to 5.2 billion euros.

“Following our performance in 2016 and 2017, all the elements in our financial outlook are either maintained or raised,” Belmer said. “We continue to target broadly stable revenues in fiscal year 2017/2018.”

Eutelsat eliminated around a tenth of its roughly 4 billion euro debt during the fiscal year, reducing it to 3.641 billion euros through discretionary free cash flow and money from the sale of its 70 percent stake in maritime connectivity provider WINS to Speedcast in August 2016. The fleet operator also reduced its export credit financings and financial leases by 140 million euros.

Video Applications, which represent roughly two thirds of Eutelsat’s business, saw a 3.3 percent decrease in revenue to 908 million euros, with broadcast revenues contracting by 2.2 percent. Eutelsat said that lower revenues from Fransat and a capacity reduction from the end of a TV d’Orange contract stunted what otherwise would have been growth in broadcast revenues of 2.7 percent.

Eutelsat added 288 new television channels on its satellites, reaching 6,630 total. HD channels now count for 17.2 percent of all channels broadcasting on the Eutelsat fleet. Belmer said the operator now has five ultra-HD channels as well, and expects that number to reach 20 in five years.

Michel Azibert, Eutelsat’s deputy chief executive and chief commercial and development officer, said that the operator’s recent contract renewal with Arqiva came with better pricing for Eutelsat at the same volume of capacity. The renewal with Digiturk, Turkey’s largest pay-TV provider, secures Eutelsat business “in a difficult political and economic context,” given the failed coup last year and ensuing unsettled political environment there.

Belmer used both deals to affirm Eutelsat’s stance on the health of the broadcast business overall.

“[It] is a sign that what we have been consistently saying, that our video business is resilient and has room for slight growth going forward. It’s proven,” he said.

Broadband opportunity

For fiscal year 2018/2019, Belmer said he expects a return to slight growth before seeing a “step up in connectivity revenues.” Eutelsat’s fixed broadband and mobile broadband, collectively just 12 percent of revenues, grew by 18.4 and 22.5 percent respectively over the year. Aeronautical broadband customers Gogo and Panasonic Avionics both increased their capacity commitments. Eutelsat also resold the majority of the capacity from a cancelled deal with Bras Trading, a Florida-based company that wanted to do aero-broadband in Brazil, to Taqnia Aerospace in Saudi Arabia for inflight connectivity across Europe, the Middle East and Northern Africa.

Belmer said Konnect Africa, Eutelsat’s sub-Saharan Africa focused satellite broadband initiative, is progressing well since replacing the capacity leased from Israeli satellite operator Spacecom on the lost Amos-6 with capacity on Yahsat satellites. The venture, which started service in June, is not generating much revenue yet, he said, but is in line with Eutelsat goals and should “accelerate quite significantly during the course of fiscal year ’18.”

Belmer said Eutelsat’s broadband joint venture with ViaSat, which involves Eutelsat cofinancing the second ViaSat-3 satellite and ViaSat paying for nearly half of Eutelsat’s Ka-Sat, is up and running with a joint team in Lausanne, Switzerland. He said Eutelsat is still negotiating with ViaSat on technical and financial elements of the next steps in the joint venture.

Along with the joint venture, Eutelsat is also part of ViaSat’s team in a legal battle over the legitimacy of fleet operator Inmarsat’s use of a European Commission S-band mobile satellite services spectrum license for a terrestrial air-to-ground network across Europe. Belmer said Eutelsat believes it has a very strong case that Inmarsat’s application of the license “was a distortion of usage.”

Eutelsat feels strongly convinced to the point that the company “must prepare to be engaged into litigation at local level if needed,” he said.

Inmarsat launched an S-band payload to compliment the air-to-ground network in June. Frederik van Essen, Inmarsat Aviation’s senior vice president of strategy, described the allegations as “entirely without merit and fundamentally misconceived,” during a June interview with SpaceNews.

Although Beijing Xinwei Technology Group’s acquisition of Spacecom remains in limbo, the satellite operator is continuing to move forward with its plans to expand its broadband service offering in Africa. Last August, Beijing Xinwei subsidiary Luxembourg Space Telecommunication announced it would acquire Spacecom for $285 million in a reverse triangular merger contingent on a number of precedents, including the successful launch of the Amos 6 satellite. However, following the loss of the satellite in a launchpad explosion, Spacecom’s shareholders have since left the acquisition “on hold,” Spacecom CEO David Pollack told Via Satellite.

Despite the setback, Pollack believes Spacecom is in a good position to progress with fleet upgrades that will allow it to expand broadcast and connectivity services across Africa, as well as the Middle East and Europe. Amos 6 was the second satellite Spacecom lost in two years, after Amos 5 failed on orbit in 2015. But because the costs of both satellites were covered by insurance, the company remains financially secure, Pollack said.

“Our bond holders received the full amount that our notes promised, so in that sense, the balance sheet was deleveraged,” he said. “The confidence that this breeds has allowed us to raise capital for our next satellite, Amos 17, and for our operations. In fact, our most recent offering to the public this spring was well oversubscribed both by institutional and public investors.”

To accommodate for the loss of Amos 6, Spacecom leased AsiaSat 8 from AsiaSat in December, rebranded the satellite as Amos 7 and moved it to the 4 degrees west orbital slot. However, Spacecom plans to return the satellite to AsiaSat after four years, by which time the company plans to have launched two of its own additional satellites. Amos 8, scheduled to launch in 2020, will replace Amos 6 at the 4 degrees west hot spot, while the tri-band Amos 17, scheduled to launch in early 2019, will be at the core of Spacecom’s initiatives in Africa.

Originally, Facebook and Eutelsat planned to jointly leverage all of the capacity on Amos 6 to provide internet access across Africa. Whether those plans will come to fruition is now dubious, as Eutelsat signed a multi-year capacity agreement with Yahsat in October to kick off its Konnect Africa broadband venture using the Al Yah 2 satellite. Once Al Yah 3 launches near the end of this year, Eutelsat will further expand services using its 18 additional spot beams — so the chances of Spacecom playing a role here in the future are slim.

Facebook also stated that it would turn to fiber to pursue connectivity in Africa. In February, the company announced plans to partner with Airtel and Bandwidth and Cloud Services (BCS) to build out 500 miles of fiber optic cables in Uganda.

Pollack did not confirm where discussions with Facebook have since led, stating only that “any possible future plans with Facebook … will have to be different than the way business was on Amos 6.”

Nonetheless, Spacecom remains undeterred in its larger growth strategy, as Pollack describes the opportunity in Africa as “ripe.” Currently, the company is working to transition its customers from Standard Definition (SD) to High Definition (HD) and Ultra-HD/4K, and will use a combination of broad regional beams and high-throughput spot beams on Amos 17 to maximize throughput and spectral efficiency.

“Operating from 17 degrees east, it will revitalize, expand and strengthen Spacecom’s coverage in Africa’s emerging satellite service markets, as well as in the Middle East and Europe,” Pollack said. “We are excited by the satellite’s capabilities to serve as a catalyst for our growth plans over the next decade. We are committed to Africa’s connectivity, and plan to support additional services over Africa with Amos 8, as well.”

While Pollack said Spacecom will continue to focus on GEO High-Throughput Satellites (HTS) in the long-term, some analysts have expressed concern about the threat to legacy broadcasters from new content formats such as Over-the-Top (OTT) services. But even in regions like Asia, where OTT is becoming quickly popular, Pollack remains confident about the competitive landscape, noting that creating new relationships is key to surviving in the satellite business. “OTT, fiber and changes in content production and content use by consumers are part of the environment,” he said. “Satellite will always be part of the mix, complementary rather than in competition with technological advances.”

WASHINGTON — Citing a long-term drought in satellite orders, Space Systems Loral has laid off a number of employees at its California satellite manufacturing facility, the company confirmed June 22.

In a statement to SpaceNews, SSL President John Celli said an “extended slowdown” in orders for geostationary orbit communications satellites led the company to this round of layoffs.

“We have seen an extended slowdown in orders for GEO satellites across the industry,” he said. “With fewer satellites coming into the factory we have to make reductions to remain competitive.”

Company spokesperson Wendy Lewis said SSL was not disclosing the number of people laid off. A source familiar with the layoffs said about eight percent of the company’s workforce was affected, which would be on the order of 200 employees.

“We continue to have a team of more than 2,000 in Palo Alto, and have carefully planned in order to meet all our customer commitments and to be prepared for new contract awards,” Celli said in his statement.

SSL has not announced an order for a commercial geostationary communications satellite since July 2016, when it said it would build two satellites for SiriusXM to replace existing spacecraft providing satellite radio services for North America.

Other satellite manufacturers have also reported weak demand for commercial GEO satellites. “Last year, there were 14 new geosynchronous satellites purchased,” Dave Thompson, president and chief executive of Orbital ATK, said in a May 11 earnings call about the company’s quarterly financial results. “And at this point, my crystal ball for 2017 is somewhere in the 12 to 14 satellites, so not better than last year.” He added he hoped for a rebound in orders in 2018 or 2019.

Boeing offered a similar assessment in March, forecasting between 13 and 17 commercial GEO satellite orders in 2017. “We hoped it would have picked up by now, but we are not seeing it,” Dawn Harms, Boeing Satellite Systems International vice president for global sales and marketing, said at a media briefing during the Satellite 2017 conference.

SSL, which in the past has relied almost exclusively on commercial GEO satellite business, has diversified in the last year, seeking more government business. The company won awards from NASA and DARPA for two separate satellite servicing programs, Restore-L and Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS), respectively. SSL is also the prime contractor for NASA’s Psyche asteroid mission, selected as part of the agency’s latest Discovery program competition in January.

Even some of this government business is in jeopardy, however. As part of NASA’s fiscal year 2018 budget proposal, the agency announced it would restructure the Restore-L program. Restore-L, which received $130 million in the final 2017 appropriations bill, would receive no funding in 2018, with that work transitioned to a satellite servicing technology development program funded at $45 million in the request.

Another thing when you just point to all the toys and gadgets we have our grandparents didn t, so what. Joy, Jana, Jill, Jessa and Jinger during a hair-and-makeup test scene on Season 8 of TLC s 19 Kids and Counting. I certainly would drop everything for him, but in the meantime, I have been moving on and finding other interests to occupy my time, which he s been very proud of.

When I was eight years old, I asked my mother if Wonder Woman was black. It was 1989—almost 30 years before I’d eagerly await the premiere of the first Wonder Woman movie. As a child, I had seen the Amazonian princess portrayed by Lynda Carter, who looked unmistakably white, on the syndicated television show I loved. But in many iconic pictures in the comic books I read, Wonder Woman appeared to have a trace of melanin that made me think—maybe?

Maybe I could believably be her for Halloween? Or maybe, simply, I could be wonderful, too. “She’s white,” my mother told me, perhaps wistfully, but definitively. Not wanting to dash my hopes, she added, “But she’s not real. So she can be whatever race you want her to be.”

Later that week, at an after-school event, armed with a coloring book, a brown crayon, and my mother’s voice still in my head, I filled in Wonder Woman’s skin to match my own. A white mother who was supervising the students saw my work; with shock, she asked why I’d “ruined” my picture. I told her I’d wanted to make my heroine look like me. “It doesn’t matter,” the woman declared pointedly. “She doesn’t have to look like you. You can still want to be her.”

It seemed this sentiment was everywhere I turned at the time. “Race shouldn’t matter,” the late ’80s had told me through the “very special episodes” of my favorite TV programs. From Family Ties to Golden Girls, shows during this time tackled race and racism without ever acknowledging that racial differences mattered. These episodes were usually resolved with an appeal to commonalities and the message that racists were the only people who “saw color.” According to popular culture of this era, gender differences were empowering, but racial differences were divisive. I didn’t yet have a vocabulary that included “white feminism,” a shorthand term for a “race-blind” form of feminism that ends up centering the needs of white women at the expense of women of color. Even so, I certainly had the model for it: I was allowed to prefer Wonder Woman to Superman, but I wasn’t allowed to imagine Wonder Woman as black.

Comic books have long famously told stories of oppression—characters grapple with feelings of otherness and alienation, fear of discrimination, a need to hide a true identity. But so often these allegories center on superpowered individuals who are white and male, making their claim to these stories of marginalization ring false. Wonder Woman is white, I was reminded again and again. And yet, her story and overlapping identities—a superhero in a world of humans and a heroine in a world of heroes—felt uniquely familiar to me. They led me to think her character perhaps made more sense as a black woman.

Wonder Woman and I were both outsiders on two levels. Her powers set her apart from other humans, but among the other members of the Justice League, she was relegated to secretary. My race set me apart from my white classmates, but I learned at a young age that within the black community my gender marked me as inferior. I remember as a child being told by my hairdresser that feminism wasn’t for black women. “For us,” she explained, “the man is here, and we’re here,” she said gesturing with her hands to illustrate that to be a black woman meant that a man I had never met would always be stationed above me.As I got older, I became better able to name my double displacement; I was frustrated with the racism I saw in feminist circles and with the misogyny I saw among racial-justice advocates. And Wonder Woman’s state of constant otherness only became more meaningful.

But as a girl, I most commiserated with Wonder Woman when she sought to reconcile her inner strength and ferocity with the need of others to see her as peaceful and feminine. I had learned early on that it wouldn’t take a lot for me to be viewed as angry and deemed unlikeable. Images of neck-rolling, finger-snapping, gum-popping black women caricatured in movies and TV shows showed me exactly what people expected from me.

These expectations were memorably laid out by one of my favorite TV shows when I was 10, Martin, via two characters: Gina, the light-skinned, kind, and happy love interest, and Pam, the dark-skinned, needed-a-weave-to-hide-her-nappy-hair, perpetually single best friend. The jokes at Pam’s expense came from the fact that she was supposedly too aggressive and masculine. Meanwhile, Gina, who clearly had a better role, was unabashedly feminine. I knew, with my dark skin, nappy hair, strong opinions, and sarcastic sense of humor, that I’d be seen as a Pam. So over time, I became a bubbly, happy, slow-to-upset black girl you would never call angry. Even today, I wonder if the bubbly, happy, slow-to-upset black woman I’ve become is who I really am, or if it’s just my own Diana Prince, the version of myself I created to protect my secret, real identity.

Wonder Woman seemed to understand this psychic conflict. She’s one of the strongest heroes in D.C. Comics canon. According to one origin story, she was blessed with “the strength of Hercules”; in the other, she’s an actual demigoddess, the daughter of Zeus. Among comic-book fans, an ongoing debate rages over whether Wonder Woman could best Superman in a fight. But unlike her powerful peers, Wonder Woman must retain a femininity that her physical prowess seems to undermine. The result is a sometimes-contradictory character—a warrior by training and birthright who prefers diplomacy to battle. A would-be Pam who was only ever supposed to be seen as Gina.

Wonder Woman once famously explained her philosophy: “We have a saying among my people. ‘Don’t kill if you can wound, don’t wound if you can subdue, don’t subdue if you can pacify. And don’t raise your hand at all unless you’ve first extended it.’” It’s a moving sentiment, but an odd one for a world in which one-dimensional villains often leave heroes with no other choice than violence. But perhaps not that odd after all, given that Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston, was himself an imperfect feminist thinker who held the essentialist belief that women were naturally more peaceful than men.

Wonder Woman didn’t get to act on anger, and neither did I. I was terrified of how I’d be seen if I ever did, in part because Wonder Woman once showed me exactly what could happen. In one famous storyline, Sacrifice part IV, Wonder Woman was forced to kill a villain, Maxwell Lord, to save Superman’s and Batman’s lives. Lord had tricked the Justice League members into thinking he was an ally, when in fact he planned to destroy all superheroes, whom he viewed as a global threat. Lord convinced Superman that both Batman and Wonder Woman were his enemies and forced him to attack. After subduing Batman, Superman came after Wonder Woman. Instead of fighting her friend, Wonder Woman captured Lord and used her Lasso of Truth. Lord told her the only way to stop him was to kill him. Which she did.

Unfortunately for Wonder Woman, that moment was broadcast publicly: The world saw Wonder Woman kill Lord without any context. The panel from that moment showed Wonder Woman from the perspective of those watching her, her face darkened and twisted into something ugly and murderous. The public turned on her. Even Superman and Batman, whose lives she had saved with her action, refused to hear her side and severed their friendship. This double standard infuriated me. This was nowhere near the first time a hero had killed in the service of a greater good. It wasn’t her role as a hero that her actions betrayed, but her role as a woman. It was her loss of femininity, not the moral high ground, that made this moment so shocking.

Wonder Woman’s fate was one I had tried to avoid for years with a painful balancing act. Black women have long had to navigate stereotypes that create a similar sort of bind: Our reputed preternatural strength is used as a weapon to force us to withstand greater physical, emotional, and spiritual burdens. The stereotype of the “strong black woman” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the identity of black women becomes indistinguishable from our struggle. This is evident in the archetype of the Mammy, the black maternal figure who acts as a cipher for the burdens of the white people around her and takes them on with an ever-present smile. In the ’80s, she was Nell Harper, the happy maid to a white family on Gimme A Break! and Flo Evans, the put-upon matriarch from Good Times. These women sublimated their own needs for those of others, and always did it with a smile.

But when black women stop smiling, as it were, they’re easily reimagined as overly aggressive and mean. The Mammy archetype gives way to the Angry Black Woman trope, also known as Sapphire—named for the bullying black female character from the early American sitcom Amos ‘n’ Andy. Sapphire’s fury, and by extension the fury of black women, is assumed both to be an overreaction and inherently threatening. The result is that when a black woman shows anger, no matter how justified, she must immediately contend with the fear that her emotions will be seen, taken out of context, and result in everyone turning on her.

Wonder Woman, I felt, understood this impossible situation; I had seen her suffer for it. As I grew up, Wonder Woman grew with me. In later versions of her stories, her feminism became more self-aware and conscious of the politics of the time in many of the same ways mine did. And as her symbolism for many female comic fans deepened, the special meaning she held for me deepened as well.

Since I found out the Wonder Woman movie was finally in the works, I’ve been excited but also a little nervous. Yes, a white actress, Gal Gadot, had been cast as the lead. But, I wondered, would the creators see in her what I had all these years? Would Wonder Woman still chafe at the forced dichotomy between her strength and her womanhood, her peaceful demeanor and her righteous anger? Would they infuse her story with enough of mine that a little black girl who sees the movie might get to wonder, maybe?

I’m sensitive to the argument that every character can’t embody every identity, and that the solution to Hollywood’s larger diversity problem can’t possibly fall to any single movie or creator to fix. And yet I’ve begun to hear that argument not as a lament or a promise to do better with future characters and opportunities, but as a familiar admonishment to put away the brown crayon and stop trying to ruin the picture.

I’ll see Wonder Woman. I’ll likely see it multiple times. And I’m sure I’ll love it because I’ve been loving her since I was eight. But I’m also sure I’ll challenge her to love me a little more. I’ve been doing that since I was eight, too.

At a conference in Vienna Monday, scientists proposed the Joint Europa Mission, including a lander and orbiter to study the moon of Jupiter thought to have a subsurface ocean of liquid water.

It’s unclear how this proposal would work with existing NASA studies of a Europa lander mission that could launch as soon as 2025. [New Scientist]

More News

Israeli satellite operator Spacecom is looking for a new suitor after a Chinese company backed out of a deal to buy it. Spacecom announced last August that Beijing Xinwei Technology Group would buy the company for $285 million, a deal contingent on the successful launch of Spacecom’s Amos-6 satellite. However, Amos-6 was destroyed in a Falcon 9 pad explosion days after the deal was announced, putting the sale in jeopardy. Efforts to renegotiate the sale have failed, and Spacecom’s owner, Eurocom Group, is looking for other potential buyers. Spacecom, meanwhile, is planning to build a replacement for Amos-6, with a goal of launching it by 2020. [SpaceNews]

President Trump suggested he’d like to accelerate plans to send humans to Mars. In a conversation with astronauts on the ISS, he asked about NASA’s schedule for human missions to Mars. Told that such missions are currently planned for the 2030s, he responded, “Well, we want to try and do it during my first term or, at worst, during my second term.” While some interpreted that comment as a joke, he later said of sending astronauts to Mars, “I think we’ll do it a lot sooner than we’re even thinking.” Trump didn’t comment on near-term NASA issues, like selecting a new administrator or reestablishing the National Space Council, during the 20-minute conversation. [SpaceNews]

Trump’s Mars comments overshadowed the reason for the call, to celebrate a new NASA record. Astronaut Peggy Whitson set a new U.S. record Monday for cumulative days in space at 534, breaking the mark set last year by Jeff Williams. With a recent extension of her current mission on the ISS, she will spend more than 660 days in space before returning to Earth in September. A banner on the ISS, visible in the call with the president, celebrated her as the “New U.S. High-Time Space Ninja.” [collectSPACE]

Roscosmos has dismissed three veteran cosmonauts. The state space corporation said Monday that Sergei Volkov, Alexander Samokutyayev and Sergei Revin has been dismissed from the cosmonaut corps. Sources said that Volkov, who has spent 547 days in space on three missions, resigned. Samokutyayev, who spent 331 days in space, and Revin, who spent 125 days in space, were reportedly removed for medical reasons. [TASS]

WASHINGTON — The owners of satellite operator Spacecom have reopened their search for someone to buy the Israeli company after a month of trying without success to rekindle the interest of a once-eager Chinese suitor.

Eurocom Group, Spacecom’s Israeli owners, had reached an agreement last August with Beijing Xinwei Technology Group, a Chinese conglomerate that intended to purchase Spacecom through a newly created Luxembourgian entity called Luxembourg Space Telecommunication. The deal hinged on the successful launch of a large Ka- and Ku-band satellite that had Facebook as an anchor customer. When the satellite, Amos-6, was destroyed last September because its SpaceX Falcon 9 launcher exploded during a routine pre-launch fueling test, both the Facebook deal and Xinwei’s interest went up in smoke.

Spacecom said late last year it hadn’t given up on bringing Xinwei back to the table. Now, it appears, the company is ready to move on.

“At the moment there are no talks with Xinwei,” Jacob Keret, Spacecom’s senior vice president of sales and marketing for Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, told SpaceNews.

Keret said Spacecom has grown accustomed with operating with a “For Sale” sign out front and doesn’t let it affect the way it does business. “The shareholders are still looking for a buyer. This has been done for the last three years. It doesn’t affect us on a daily basis as a company. We get used to this uncertainty.”

As evidence, Spacecom is designing a replacement for Amos-6 and plans to seek bids from builders this year.

“This will be done during the next quarter or two in order to be ready to place it in orbit in 2020,” he said.

Spacecom borrowed AsiaSat-8 from Hong Kong-based fleet operator AsiaSat in December to temporarily fill the void left by Amos-6. Since rebranded as Amos-7, Spacecom has reloaded customers from the deorbited Amos-2 onto the loaner satellite. Spacecom has a four-year contract with AsiaSat for the satellite, with the option of a one-year extension, but Keret said Spacecom would prefer not to use the extra time, making a 2020 build-deadline a high criterion for bidders.

“We are aiming to give back the Amos-7 satellite to AsiaSat at the end of 2020. This leaves us from today, three and a half years, which is enough time to choose almost any manufacturer. The price of the platform will be a major part of that. Each year that we are leasing the satellite for AsiaSat we have to pay $22 million, and our intention is not to use the fifth year … if one manufacturer will take 36 or 40 months, this has to be taken into consideration.”

Israel Aerospace Industries, the state-owned company that built Amos-6, and Boeing, Spacecom’s pick to build the Amos-5 replacement Amos-17, are top contenders vying to build Amos-8, he said.

Keret said Amos-8 will likely be smaller than the 5,500-kilogram Amos-6, and will focus on the Middle East and Europe. The satellite might have steerable beams and high throughput capacity, but neither of those features have been decided on yet, he said.

Amos-17, a tri-band satellite from Boeing slated to launch in 2019, will cover Europe, the Middle East and Africa with high-throughput capacity in C-, Ku- and Ka-band. Keret said Spacecom will chose a launch provider by the end of this year. He declined to say whether SpaceX would offer a free launch as compensation for the loss of Amos-6.

Facebook? It’s complicated

Keret said Spacecom is still talking with Facebook about future business together, albeit not a reconstruction of the 2015 deal arranged through Eutelsat. After Amos-6, Eutelsat procured Ka-band capacity on Yahsat’s upcoming Al Yah 3 satellite, making progress on its Africa-focused connectivity program Konnect Africa without Facebook.

“With Amos-17, this might be some opportunity for us and for [Facebook], but it’s yet to come. That’s in two years, and many things can change in two years, but yes absolutely we are still talking with them and they are talking with us. There are no hard feelings,” he said.

Keret said Spacecom is planning an increased presence in mobility markets — namely in-flight connectivity, but also maritime — with satellites like Amos-17. Television channels upgrading from standard definition to high definition, which requires more satellite bandwidth, is also driving new revenue, he said.

Keret said Spacecom’s Amos-4 satellite at 65 degrees east is split 50-50 between broadcast and government customers. Spacecom’s other two satellites located at 4 degrees west — Amos-3 and Amos-7 — are split roughly 80 percent broadcast, and 20 percent connectivity for data, government and VSAT networks, he said.

DENVER — Lockheed Martin wants to cut in half the time it needs to build satellites that use its flagship A2100 spacecraft platform.

Brian O’Connor, vice president of production operations for Lockheed Martin Space Systems, said April 3 that the average time needed to complete such a satellite today is around 36 to 40 months.

“We are trying to get a satellite up in space in 18 months,” he said.

Lockheed Martin recently overhauled its A2100 spacecraft bus, conducting a “technology refresh” to reduce cost by 35 percent and build times by 25 percent. Kay Sears, the vice president of strategy and business development for Lockheed Martin’s Space Systems division, told SpaceNews in March that the company is in the “last mile” for reaching those goals, which began in 2014.

O’Connor didn’t describe the newly stated goal of a 50-percent reduction in manufacturing time as a new initiative, but as a target made feasible by the introduction of new manufacturing techniques, mainly additive manufacturing and robotics.

O’Connor used a 46-inch (1.17 meter) titanium tank produced through additive manufacturing, or 3-D printing, as an example of how to drastically slash build times. Designed for the modernized A2100, he said 3-D printing cut the tank’s production time “from 18 months down to the neighborhood of less than six months.” That tank will be qualified by the end of the year, he said.

O’Connor said Lockheed Martin wants to reach its 18-month goal without employing a long-term approach that requires pre-purchasing hardware with lengthy fabrication times well in advance of customer orders.

“Our intention is to be able to not have to lay out all that long-lead material to go buy down that schedule,” he said, adding that Lockheed Martin wants the ability to create unique designs and not “cookie cutter” satellites.

3-D printing “allows us to do custom designs without paying the premium of a custom design,” he said.

Lockheed Martin is using 3-D printing for limited applications today, such as tanks and brackets, O’Connor said, but that will change over time. O’Connor described the company’s use of 3-D printed technology as just at the beginning of the curve.

For satellite operators racing to secure a claim to a specific orbital slot, replace an older satellite running low on fuel or beat a competitor to market, production time is an important criteria when buying a new satellite. Israeli satellite operator Spacecom, for example, said the big reason it recently purchased Amos-17 from Boeing was the company’s ability to build the satellite in just 24 months.

COLORADO SPRINGS — Global-IP Cayman, a Cayman Islands-based startup, has picked SpaceX to launch a high-throughput satellite it has under contract to Boeing.

In an April 3 statement, Global-IP said the launch will take place in the last quarter of 2018 on a Falcon 9 rocket.

“We are pleased to partner with Global-IP for this important mission,” SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said in a written statement. “Once fully deployed, this satellite will expand Internet services across Sub-Saharan Africa, benefiting both consumers and businesses.”

Global-IP ordered GiSat-1, a 150-Gbps, Ka-band spot beam satellite from Boeing Satellite Systems International of El Segundo, California, in September. According to Boeing, the 702-model satellite’s digital payload will have twice as much capacity as previous digital payload designs.

Global-IP CEO Bahram Pourmand, the former executive vice president and general manager of Hughes Network Systems’ international division, co-founded Global-IP in 2016 with Emil Youssefzadeh and Umar Javed of STM, a VSAT hardware manufacturer acquired in 2013 by EMC (which is now part of Global Eagle Entertainment).

GiSat-1 is scheduled to enter service in 2019. Global-IP says the satellite will operate with more than 10 gateways in Europe and multiple additional gateways within Africa.

“We envision our investment in this project will increase the Internet penetration across the region and contribute significantly to the economic growth of all the countries we will serve,” Youssefzadeh, chief technology officer, said in a prepared statement.

Global-IP is entering a crowded market that has more high-throughput capacity on the way. In addition to the many operators that already have capacity over Africa, Avanti’s Hylas-4, Yahsat’s Al Yah 3, Spacecom’s Amos-17 and Fibersat’s hosted payload Fibersat-1 are all expected to bring more Ka-band capacity to the continent before GiSat-1 is in orbit.

Beijing (Sputnik) Mar 13, 2017 -
Chinese state media is reporting that the country's space program has developed a craft capable of both landing on the moon and flying in low-Earth orbit.

The new spacecraft is claimed to be able to accommodate multiple astronauts, according to spaceship engineer Zhang Bainian, who Science and Technology Daily cited as comparing the forthcoming ship to the Orion craft currently in development by the European Space Agency and NASA.

All six crewed missions of China's Shenzhou spacecraft, modeled after Russia's Soyuz series, have carried three astronauts in its re-entry capsule.

A late-bloomer in crewed space flight, 2003 marked the first time Beijing launched a human into space. Since that time its program has seen swift progress, and is now considered one of the top-three worldwide. In late 2016, two Chinese astronauts spent a month inside a space station during the country's most recent crewed mission.

It will take about five years to implement a fully-operational space station with a permanent crew, according to reports. The space station is thought to be a platform for future lunar-landing missions.

Last year Beijing surpassed Moscow's 17 rocket launches with 22, equaling the US for the first time, according to Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard University-based astrophysicist.

Had a launchpad explosion not grounded Washington's Space X's Falcon 9 rocket fleet in early September 2016, the US may have conducted additional launches. The explosion happened as the $195 million Amos-6 communications satellite was preparing to be launched from Cape Canaveral.

Blue Origin has signed a deal with OneWeb for five New Glenn Launches. Blue Origin said Wednesday that OneWeb had agreed to at least five launches, but didn’t specify a schedule for those launches or other terms of the deal. OneWeb General Manager Scott Sprague said at the Satellite 2017 conference that the agreement gives the company options for launching either satellites in its initial constellation or a larger follow-on system. Blue Origin announced its first customer for New Glenn, Eutelsat, on Tuesday. [SpaceNews]

Satellite manufacturers don’t yet know how policies of the new Trump administration will affect their businesses. Executives of several satellite manufacturers said at Satellite 2017 Wednesday that, while increased defense spending could benefit domestic manufacturers, they also run the risk of protectionist trade policies that could hurt their ability to sell internationally. Also of concern is the future of the Ex-Im Bank, which had been used increasingly by satellite manufacturers but which the administration is reportedly considering to eliminate. [SpaceNews]

One satellite manufacturer expects that the market for commercial satellites to remain weak in 2017.Boeing executives said this week they expected 14 to 17 commercial satellite orders industry-wide in 2017, up only slightly from 13 in 2016, the lowest annual total since 2004. Launch delays have been one reason for decreased orders, as well as decisions by some companies to revisit their plans for high-throughput satellites in reaction to the ViaSat-3 system that ViaSat is developing. [SpaceNews]

International Launch Services is making changes to its lineup of Proton vehicles. The company announced this week that they are developing a five-meter payload fairing that will be available starting in 2020. The company is also making changes to the design of lighter versions of the Proton it announced last year, including putting work on the smaller of the two, the Proton Light, on hold. The company is proceeding with the Proton Medium, which will be ready for launch in late 2018. [SpaceNews]

The Air Force is considering bringing in commercial operators as partners in its Wideband Global Satcom system. Maj. Gen. David Thompson, vice commander of Air Force Space Command, said a request for proposals will soon be released, seeking bids from companies to support WGS operations. That could eventually include having those companies operate the satellites from their own facilities, rather than the Air Force’s. Thompson said the Air Force is interested in such commercial partnerships given their benefits in efficiency and effectiveness, although there are legal and policy obstacles such partnerships have to overcome. [SpaceNews]

Facebook is willing to work with the satellite industry to lower the cost of satellite user equipment. A Facebook official, Wesley Wong, said at the Satellite 2017 conference that the company continues to see satellites as an effective way to provide connectivity in underserved regions of the world, despite suffering a setback with the loss of the Amos-6 satellite last year, which Facebook had leased with Eutelsat. Wong said that standardizing satellite user equipment is key to lowering costs and making the technology more accessible. [SpaceNews]

Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, is becoming increasing useful to satellite manufacturers. Space Systems Loral said this week that its most complex 3D-printed part, an antenna tower, is performing as planned on a communications satellite launched in December. Boeing said it is using 50 to 60 3D-printed parts on some satellites that are awaiting launch, in particular complex brackets and fittings that would be difficult to build with traditional machining techniques. [SpaceNews]

WASHINGTON — Satellite manufacturers aren’t yet sure how the policies of the Trump administration will impact their businesses.

U.S. President Donald Trump campaigned on reenergizing the U.S. industrial base, which already has more satellite manufacturers than any other country in the world. Boosting defense spending, as Trump has promised, would also stand to benefit U.S. satellite manufacturers, many of which are part of larger companies that do the bulk of their business with the Pentagon. But Trump has also advocated protectionist policies that worry companies competing in a global market.

“I think we need to be very careful about how we have the discussion with the administration and with congress,” Frank Culbertson, president of Orbital ATK’s space systems group, said March 8 at the Satellite 2017 conference here. “Simplifying by saying, ‘buy only American’ … this doesn’t work for two integrators who relied on each other, as it is a global business.”

Culbertson highlighted Orbital ATK’s partnership with France-based Thales Alenia Space on the Iridium Next constellation as an example of the importance of international collaboration.

Orbital ATK created a Foreign Trade Zone to ease the process of bringing European components over to the U.S. where the spacecraft for McLean, Virginia-based satellite operator Iridium are being integrated. Together, Thales and Orbital ATK are building one satellite a week for Iridium Next, which will consist of 81 satellites total, including in-orbit assets and ground spares.

Airbus Defence and Space, which like Thales Alenia Space is based in France but has divisions spread across Europe, pointed to the International Space Station and Orion, NASA’s human spaceflight program, as good examples of international cooperation. Europe helped build the ISS, conducted supply missions using Automated Transfer Vehicles, and continues to be involved in maintaining the orbiting research lab. Airbus Defence and Space is also supplying the European Service Module (ESM) to Lockheed Martin and NASA for Orion. Nicolas Chamussy, executive vice president of space systems at Airbus Defense and Space, also described Airbus as being “fortunate enough to have an assembly line in the U.S.” for producing satellites for OneWeb. The bulk of the 900 satellites OneWeb ordered from the Airbus-OneWeb joint venture OneWeb Satellites are to be built at a factory being built in Florida.

The Trump administration might be more of a double-edged sword for Boeing than for any other U.S. company. Mark Spiwak, president of Boeing Satellite Systems International, agreed that the global nature of the satellite industry is important to recognize, but views the administration’s anti-regulation stance as potentially very favorable.

“[W]e have to be very careful in our global market,” Spiwak said, “but being pro-business and being able to help the speed of business and the affordability of business, there are some encouraging signs there. We need to play that out and stay very connected with Congress and the administration. Having discussions that are pro-business and eliminating, I’ll say, extra things that don’t add value is all in a very positive direction.”

Boeing’s hopes for a smaller regulatory burden are counterbalanced by the company’s concern that the Trump administration might pull the plug on Export-Import Bank of the United States. While all major U.S. satellite manufacturers have relied on the export-credit agency, critics sometimes refer to the institution as the “Bank of Boeing” because of Boeing’s frequent use of the agency in supporting exports, more often for aircraft than satellites.

Boeing closed two satellite orders in the past six months without Ex-Im — Amos-17 for Israel-based Spacecom, and the condosat Kacific-1/JSAT-18 for Singapore-based startup Kacific and established Japanese satellite operator Sky Perfect JSAT — but Spiwak cautioned that those successes don’t mean Ex-Im is unnecessary.

“It’s still critically needed,” he said, speaking of Ex-Im. “We’ve lost several competitions and haven’t been a part of competitions because of the inability of customers to get Ex-Im. Customers that we have signed up recently have said we’ve found a way, but we still need Ex-Im.”

Boeing customer ABS of Bermuda placed a satellite order with Boeing in June 2015, but was unable to close the deal when Congress let Ex-Im’s charter lapse. ABS has yet to find a way to move forward with its next satellite, known as ABS-8.

Thales Alenia Space Senior Vice President Martin Van Schaik confirmed the fears of U.S. satellite manufacturers that Ex-Im’s inability to lend over $10 million is sending would-be American business overseas.

“You do see that the U.S. politics have a big influence on our export line,” he said. “So if the relations between the U.S. and foreign partners deteriorate, it automatically improves our chances. It is true, like Ex-Im. I don’t mind that too much.”

But he was quick to add that protectionist policies in the U.S. would ultimately weaken European businesses, too.

“On the other hand, if there are barriers for our companies to work together to optimize our bids, it will help nobody in the end. It would be best for European industry and it will be best for U.S. industry [to work together]. We buy a lot from the U.S.; we work a lot together,” he said.

WASHINGTON — Global satellite fleet operator SES expects to turn around its enterprise connectivity business by focusing on more deals like the one it signed with Facebook last year.

SES’s enterprise division — the largest part of the Luxembourg company’s business after broadcast — provides services such as satellite connectivity for internet service providers, backhaul of cellular data, and link to remote sites. Sales were down last year, falling 13 percent to 252 million euros ($267 million).

The disappointing performance was a blemish on an otherwise solid 2016 for SES. Total revenue rose 2.7 percent to $2.188 billion — dead even with the full-year revenue that rival Intelsat reported Feb. 28. SES’s net profit surpassed $1 billion, a nearly 57-percent increase the company largely owes to last year’s acquisition of O3b, which operates a constellation of communications satellites in medium Earth orbit.

As SES seeks to grow its enterprise business, which fell to 12 percent of total revenue, down from 17 percent two years before, SES President and CEO Karim Sabbagh plans to hone the company’s focus on “Tier 1” customers like Facebook and Telkom Indonesia that need point-to-multipoint connectivity, often with customized network solutions. At the same time, SES would shift away from “Tier 2” market, where customers such as banks and retailers desire wholesale or point-to-point connectivity but have proven less profitable.

“We were able to demonstrate the new positioning during the course of 2016, delivering managed services in some of the most challenging geographies and with some of the most demanding clients. Facebook is a case and point where we’ve developed an end-to-end network, terrestrial, over our satellite network, and all the ancillary including the management of the data centers,” Sabbagh said during a Feb. 24 earnings call with investors. “That will continue to be our focus going forward.”

Facebook contracted with SES in April 2016 to provide internet connectivity in sub-Saharan Africa for Express Wifi — a Facebook service aimed at bringing internet access to underserved regions through local service providers and entrepreneurs. So far, Express Wifi is only active in India, but Facebook is preparing other regions, notably Africa, for the service. SES is supplying capacity on three satellites — Astra-2G, -3B and -4A — for Express Wifi, along with a customized service that uses a VSAT ground segment architecture from Gilat Satellite Networks.

Facebook friends

SES’s role in bringing Wi-Fi to Africa with Facebook was arguably overshadowed by the hype surrounding Facebook’s first satellite investment in capacity on Spacecom’s Amos-6 satellite through a contract with Eutelsat. When that satellite perished in a SpaceX Falcon 9 explosion in September, Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was “deeply disappointed” at the loss, and referenced Facebook’s investment in “other technologies like Aquila,” a drone connectivity project, but gave no mention of his company’s capacity on three other satellites.

Sabbagh said SES helped Facebook deploy a terrestrial network along with providing space segment resources to ensure last mile connections. SES also helped define service-level agreements, efforts Sabbagh said are bearing fruit. “That service has been ramping up over the period when we started serving them,” he said.

SES has been pruning its enterprise business for the past year and a half to make it a more profitable pursuit. Sabbagh said the company has reshaped this business by gradually disengaging the Tier 2 market, and focusing specifically on either serving enterprises that have deployed large regional networks, or working very selectively with integrators with whom SES can “have a seat at the table, working with them and their clients, and making sure that we understand how we are enabling their business.”

SES CFO Padraig McCarthy said enterprise revenues improved during the second half of 2016.

O3b

Sabbagh also pointed to O3b as an accelerator for all the company’s data services — enterprise, mobility and government. He said SES intends to design future spacecraft for data-centric services with O3b in a way that couldn’t be done prior to fully acquiring the operator last year with its constellation of 12 Ka-band high throughput satellites.

“[A] promising synergy that we are seeing now is our ability to think through the deployment of the future fleet, particularly the fleet that will serve the data-centric market in a manner where, as opposed to replacing existing GEO programs, we can sort of move straight into a MEO generation,” he said.

O3b has eight more satellites on order from Thales Alenia Space to increase its constellation size to 20 by 2018.

SES revenues for government, which also represents about 12 percent of revenues, were down 6.2 percent, not factoring in currency variations year-over-year to $256 million. Mobility on the other hand, grew 95.4 percent to $141.5 million. Growth in aeronautical and maritime connectivity have boosted mobility to 6 percent of total revenue as they became lucrative to SES over the past two to three years.

Broadcast video, representing 68 percent of SES revenues for 2016, grew 4.7 percent to $1.48 billion. Sabbagh said the growth of high definition television in emerging markets as well as Europe is driving revenues, as HD broadcasts require more capacity than standard definition. Ultra-HD, which requires even more capacity, is also starting to take root.

Sabbagh said nearly one in three channels on SES satellites today are in HD, and the operator now counts 21 commercial ultra-HD channels on its fleet. Echoing comments Eutelsat CEO Rodolphe Belmer made in early February, Sabbagh dismissed the notion that British broadcaster Sky’s promotion of a satellite-free Over-The-Top (OTT) television was a bad omen for satellite television. Sky’s decision to roll out an OTT product in areas not reached by satellite broadcasts is “complementary,” he said, and supports SES “thesis of a hybrid environment.” Sabbagh said his confidence in satellite broadcasts rests in the efficiency of satellite as the most cost effective method of delivering content with a sustained quality.

SES’s customer backlog grew by 10 percent, reaching a new high of 8.1 billion euro, or $8.6 billion.

WASHINGTON — Israeli satellite operator Spacecom has begun offering telecom services with a satellite it borrowed from AsiaSat in December to fill the void left by the loss of Amos-6, the operator said today.

Amos-6, a 5,500-kilogram satellite built by Israel Aerospace Industries to serve Africa, Europe and the Middle East, was destroyed in September when the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket poised to carry it to orbit exploded during a fueling test. In December, Spacecom signed an $88 million agreement with Hong Kong-based AsiaSat to utilize the Ku-band capacity on AsiaSat-8, AsiaSat’s newest satellite, for at least four years. AsiaSat relocated the satellite from 105.5 degrees east, where it covered China and neighboring countries, to 4 degrees west to cover Africa, Europe and the Middle East alongside Spacecom’s Amos-3 satellite.

Spacecom rebranded the 24 Ku-band transponders and four steerable beams as Amos-7. The satellite functions as a quickly needed replacement, since Amos-6 was supposed to take the place of Amos-2, a satellite launched in 2003. In a Feb. 27 statement, Spacecom said Amos-2 is reaching its end of life.

“AMOS-7 creates a stronger presence at our 4 [degrees west] orbital position,” Jacob Keret, co-founder and senior vice president of sales at Spacecom, said in a prepared statement. “Adding further redundancy to our system, the satellite is a key element in expanding our multi-regional growth patterns and enhancing the array of communications – broadcast, broadband and data – that we can provide.”

Spacecom currently operates a fleet of three telecom satellites: Amos-7 and Amos-3 at the 4 degrees west slot, and Amos-4 at 65 degrees east. The operator has the option with AsiaSat to continue using AsiaSat-8 for an additional year included in its contract.

The satellite, dubbed Amos-17 based on its orbital location over Africa, Europe and the Middle east, is intended to replace Amos-5, a four-year old satellite that suffered a fatal power failure during in 2015. Amos-17 is being built to provide significantly higher throughput capacity than Amos-5, which was built by Russia’s ISS Reshetnev with a payload supplied by Europe’s Thalia Alenia Space.

WASHINGTON — Israeli satellite operator Spacecom says efforts to sell itself to a Chinese company have stalled in recent weeks, but the Tel Aviv company has not given up on the merger.

Beijing Xinwei Technology Group was ready to pay $285 million for Spacecom last year pending the successful launch of Amos-6, a large Ka- and Ku-band satellite built to serve Africa, the Middle East and Europe. But the satellite was destroyed Sept. 1 when its SpaceX Falcon 9 launcher exploded two days before liftoff.

Reports that Beijing Xinwei Technology Group had lowered its offer to $190 million prompted denials from Spacecom in early December.

Last week, Spacecom told the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange that it has not given up on a sale to Beijing Xinwei Technology Group but disclosed that the two sides haven’t talked “recently.”

“In following up the company’s earlier statements on this matter, the company wishes to inform that although the sides have not decided to cease negotiations, in reality during the recent period, there have not been discussions between the sides,” Spacecom said in its filing with the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

Spacecom said that both sides “sides continue to show interest in the deal,” and that “a number of differences on fundamental issues remain open between the sides.”

Spacecom also told the stock exchange that “a number of other players” have shown interest in a deal should Xinwei decide to pass.

Eurocom, a private telecommunications group that owns Spacecom, has been trying for several years to sell the satellite operator.

Spacecom has three satellites in service with coverage of the U.S. East Coast to Europe, Africa and parts of Asia. The company’s youngest satellite, Amos-5, went dark in 2015 due to a power failure. Spacecom ordered a $161 million satellite from El Segundo, California-based Boeing Satellite Systems International in December to replace Amos-5 and provide some of the Ka-band capacity lost with Amos-6. The satellite, Amos-17, is due to launch in 2019.

Spacecom also agreed in December to pay AsiaSat $88 million to borrow the Ku-band payload aboard AsiaSat-8 for at least four years. The lease is meant to further relieve the sting of losing Amos-6.

WASHINGTON — When Yahsat decided to invest in its first satellite for Brazil, the the Dubai, UAE-based operator probably didn’t foresee the triple-whammy of a Zika virus outbreak, presidential impeachment, and double-digit unemployment that dogged the world’s 10th largest economy over the last two years.

Brazil fell into its second recession in five years by the time Yahsat finalized its order with U.S.-based Orbital ATK in September 2014 for Al Yah 3. The high-throughput satellite, slated to launch this year on a European Ariane 5 rocket, is expected to extend Yahsat’s commercial Ka-band coverage to an additional 600 million users across Brazil and Africa.

Yahsat Chief Executive Masood M. Sharif Mahmood told SpaceNews that Brazil’s woes haven’t made Yahsat’s first foray into South America’s telecom market easy. However, he said Yahsat is starting to see “green shoots of recovery,” with 20 to 25 percent of the Al Yah 3’s capacity already spoken for by Italy’s Telespazio, the U.K’s Talia and others.

Yahsat, which on Jan. 17 celebrated the 10th anniversary of its founding by the Abu Dhabi-owned Mubadala Development Co., will soon have three satellites on orbit assuming the launch of Al Yah 3 goes well.

The satellite’s 60 high-throughput spot beams will cover 95 percent of Brazil’s population and expand Yahsat’s coverage of Africa — the company’s largest market — to 60 percent of the continent’s population.

Part of Al Yah 3’s capacity — about 10 gigabits per second of throughput — will support Konnect Africa, Paris-based Eutelsat’s revamped strategy for delivering commercial broadband service to 20 sub-Saharan nations by 2019. Eutelsat said in November that its multi-year Al Yah 3 lease will replace the capacity lost with the Sept. 1 destruction of Amos-6, the Spacecom of Israel satellite destroyed when SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket exploded while being fueled for a pre-launch test

Mahmood said Yahsat was in the right place at the right time to pick up Eutelsat’s business. “But it didn’t come from that incident alone,” he said. “We have always maintained our position and belief in Ka and our belief in Africa … We made sure we were there on the ground, we made sure we had the future capacity, we made sure we had the right designs from a space segment and ground segment — all of that came into play.”

Yahsat turned heads shortly after its January 2007 founding when it signed a $1.66 billion contract that summer with Astrium (now Airbus Defence and Space) and Thales Alenia Space to build its first satellites — a two-spacecraft telecommunications systems for military and civilian users.

Those satellites, Yahsat 1A and Yahsat 1B, launched in 2011 and 2012 respectively, and established the operator as a formidable regional player in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Al Yah 3 now promises to strengthen Yahsat’s position in Africa while extending the operator’s reach to South America.

In an interview with SpaceNews, Mahmood discussed Yahsat’s ongoing expansion and plans for generating business in its new and established markets.

How far along is Yahsat in the preparation for Al Yah 3? How much capacity is pre-sold?

Today we are very far along the road. We are looking at a Q1 or Q2 launch for the satellite in 2017. Today we are in a position where we pre-sold a good part of the satellite and the rest we are strategically making sure we allocate for our growth for the subscriber business. The numbers reached around 20 to 25 percent of the satellite sold. This is definitely a boost of confidence in terms of our business plan and our geographic expansion because these came from both Brazil and Africa.

Brazil has been good to us. We have the Yahsat office in Rio de Janeiro, we have the team populated, we have our partnership agreement not only for wholesale, we have wholesale plus our distributors as well and we are developing the system as we speak.

Regional publications have quoted you discussing the addition of four more satellites to the Yahsat fleet. What do your expansion plans look like today?

I think the conversation you are referring to was taken out of context. The question asked at the time was “what would be your ideal scenario for the company five to 10 years down the road?” This was not the ambition.

If the question is around general ambition then yes we continually strive to grow the company, especially on the commercial side to maintain the anchor customers we have and anchor relationships we have with the United Arab Emirate armed forces and the government agencies as being the satcom solutions provider.

On the commercial side we would like to grow that business, enrich our presence in our existing markets as well as get into other segments. As you know we have an MOU [Memorandum of Understanding] with Panasonic to explore working together on a constellation for aero [connectivity] and an MOU with Etihad Airways to do a test flight on one of their planes. We are pushing actively along those lines.

So is Yahsat not planning four additional satellites between now and 2020?

We are always planning additional satellites, but … in terms of a specific number of missions, that is something that is left to the market to determine once we see how things are picking up.

How did Yahsat’s recent deal with Eutelsat come about?

As you know it came at the backdrop of an unfortunate incident. We are never happy when we see a launch failure, especially since it impacts the manifest of the industry and impacts our colleagues and other operators. But it didn’t come from that incident alone. We have always maintained our position and belief in Ka and our belief in Africa. I think a lot of other operators made the move later on, but we made the move early on. We made sure we were there on the ground, we made sure we had the future capacity, we made sure we had the right designs from a space segment and ground segment — all of that came into play.

We saw a way for us to have a win-win relationship whereby we contribute to them and help them get back on track while they derisk some of our business in Africa.

Does that deal continue after Eutelsat launches their Africa Broadband Satellite in 2019?

The way we see it is the market is big enough for both of us, and the market specifically in Africa, while it is a niche market, the market is enough for both operators to be active in and build the capacity through their satellites or through our satellites, so I think it will have to be played by ear, but today what we see is the market is big enough for all of the capacity that’s coming.

Are there still discussions ongoing with Facebook about using Eutelsat now potentially through Yahsat?

I cannot comment on Eutelsat … but with respect to Yahsat we always keep an open mind to all of the discussions with all the interested parties in Africa. There will be Facebook, other operators — it’s very collaborative. We had discussions with Facebook a few years back and continue to have discussions with them, and we are open to any transaction or collaboration that the likes of Facebook would like to have.

Eutelsat coverage map for Konnect Africa. Credit: Eutelsat

Yahsat has gradually invested more and more heavily into Ka-band HTS. Is this where you see the future?

The jury is out on the desirability of Ka-band. What enables Yahsat to have a leading position is the fact that when we were moving towards Ka-band, not a lot of people were going to that spectrum band. As an experiment it worked for us, and that’s why we want to continue on this. We like to always be on the lookout for what’s coming out next so that we don’t become a one-trick pony.

What that means is we would like to repeat that success with what’s coming next. We are keeping a close eye on the mega-constellation developments, be it OneWeb or others, keeping a close interaction with them to make sure we could tap into any opportunity once this becomes viable.

When we talk about the future with regard to spectrum we are very engaged with satellite bodies such as the EMEA Satellite Operator’s Association (ESOA). Yahsat is involved in the spectrum conversation with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the telecom sector. That puts us in a position not only to lead the defense on future bands such as Q and V, but also to be aware of the priorities in those bands. We are keeping an eye on those bands and the satcom discussion.

Yahsat was providing service for U.S. forces to augment WGS. Is Yahsat’s government business still U.S. focused or is it focused on the UAE and other nations?

Primarily the [UAE and other nations]. We’ve had a landmark deal with providing secure satcom for the Kingdom of Bahrain DoD. We extended to them a fully managed solution where they have their own satcom infrastructure fully developed in the kingdom using our satellites.

We have also been able to gain traction and deliver some satcom solutions and backup cases for Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) DoDs. Today we see a pickup in the region.

There is still a lot of talk about oversupply in many markets. Have you felt pricing pressure from too much capacity being available in the markets where Yahsat is active?

The fact that in some countries we are the only available option, and not only from the skies but the only available option on the ground, this has given us some resilience, but it is an inescapable fact that the emerging markets have been hit and that caused some pressure for us. Luckily we were in a position where we are able to protect against that by making sure that we are in parts of the market where we are protected.

Ten years from now, where do you envision Yahsat will be?

When Yahsat was incorporated we didn’t even have the iPhone … if you look at 10 years in this millennium, the jump in business models is almost equivalent to two or three decades if you measure it against the previous millennium. Things really do change and it’s difficult to know what to expect in the future. What I would like to see is the continued growth of our commercial business and the continued dependence of the government business on our solutions.

The Proton was scheduled to launch EchoStar-21 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Wednesday, but late last week Russian officials announced a delay in order to perform additional tests on the launch vehicle.

A new launch date has not been formally announced, but Russian sources said the flight is likely to be postponed until mid-January. [TASS]

More News

NASA has found no damage to the James Webb Space Telescope after an “anomaly” during a vibration test earlier this month. The agency said Friday that examinations of the telescope structure found no evidence of damage after accelerometers mounted on the telescope detected an unspecified problem during a Dec. 3 test at the Goddard Space Flight Center. NASA said that engineers are making good progress on tracking down the source of the anomaly and could be ready to resume vibration tests in January. The vibration tests are designed to simulate the conditions the spacecraft will experience during launch on an Ariane 5 in late 2018. [SpaceNews]

The second SpaceShipTwo made its second glide flight Thursday. The glide flight went as planned, Virgin Galactic said, but offered few details about the flight. The free flight was the second for the suborbital spacecraft, known as VSS Unity, after an initial glide flight Dec. 3. The test was the last planned for SpaceShipTwo in 2016, as the company gears up for additional unpowered and, later, powered test flights of the vehicle in 2017. [SpaceNews]

Spacecom decided to purchase a Boeing communications satellite despite the lack of Ex-Im financing. Officials with the Israeli satellite operator said they decided last week to purchase a Boeing 702 for its Amos-17 spacecraft largely because Boeing could deliver the satellite in 24 months. Boeing officials, meanwhile, said that while they won the Spacecom order without the benefit of Ex-Im financing, the bank’s inability to approve deals larger than $10 million means they are losing other satellite orders to companies that can use Canadian or French export credit financing. [SpaceNews]

Boeing and Engility won space-related contracts last week. Boeing received an $8.8 million contract modification from the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) to help operate and maintain the Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) satellite constellation in 2017. SMC also exercised a $47 million contract option with Engility Corp. for providing continued systems engineering and integration support for the center’s Remote Sensing Systems Directorate. [SpaceNews]

India’s space agency is looking to lease a foreign communications satellite. ISRO is seeking to take over all the capacity on either a satellite with Ku-band transponders already in orbit or one planned for launch in the first quarter of 2017. The satellite would be moved to one of six slots in geostationary orbit held by India, and operate there for two to three years. The satellite will “temporarily augment” capacity on existing Indian satellites. While ISRO routinely leases capacity on foreign satellites, this is the first time the agency has sought to lease an entire satellite. [The Hindu]

Space Florida is providing a line of credit to a space manufacturing company. The $1 million line of credit will be used by Made In Space to fund a project to test the production of high-quality fiber optic cables on the International Space Station. The hardware the company is developing for the experiment will serve as collateral for the loan, marking the first time Space Florida has used “space-bound or space-based equipment” to secure a loan. [Florida Today]

Piers Sellers, a NASA astronaut and climate scientist, passed away Friday. The 61-year-old Sellers had been diagnosed about a year earlier with advanced pancreatic cancer, but continued to work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center as acting director of Earth sciences there, with a focus on climate change research. Earlier in his career, he flew on three shuttle missions between 2002 and 2010, performing six spacewalks to help assemble the space station. A week before his death, Sellers won the Gen. James E. Hill Lifetime Space Achievement Award from the Space Foundation. [collectSPACE]

WASHINGTON — Spacecom is buying its newest spacecraft from an American supplier without relying on financial support from the Export-Import Bank of the United States, according to a company official.

Jacob Keret, a Spacecom co-founder and senior vice president of sales and marketing for Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, told SpaceNews Dec. 21 that the Israeli satellite operator has “no intention at this time to use Ex-Im financing” to build Amos-17.

Spacecom ordered Amos-17 from Boeing Satellite Systems in a $161 million deal announced Dec. 21 to replace Amos-5, a satellite built by Russia’s ISS Reshetnev around a payload supplied by Thales Alenia Space of France. Amos-5 ceased communicating in November 2015 after a power failure.

Amos-17 is the first satellite Spacecom has bought from a U.S. supplier. The order comes during a vexing time for U.S. satellite builders trying to sell abroad.

The U.S. Ex-Im Bank, a frequently-used source of below-market financing for satellite deals, was closed to new business for nearly half of 2015. Congress passed legislation in December 2015 allowing the bank to reopen, but because its board of directors lacks a quorum, it still cannot finance transactions over $10 million until lawmakers add another member to the bank’s board.

That limitation has taken away a deal sweetener for companies such as Boeing, which has lost two deals — one for the ABS-8 satellite for Bermuda-based ABS and another for Singapore-based Kacific’s first satellite, Kacific-1 — since Ex-Im’s lending window closed. Orbital ATK of Dulles, Virginia, lost a contract last year to build Azerspace-2 for Azercosmos of Azerbaijan, which considered export credit financing as pass-or-fail criteria for any deal.

ABS-8 and Kacific-1 remain unordered, while Azerspace-2 went to Space Systems Loral, a U.S. satellite manufacturer that has access to export credit financing in Canada through its Canadian parent company MDA.

Keret said Spacecom chose Boeing specifically because of the company’s ability to quickly produce the satellite. Spacecom has lost two satellites in less than a year’s time, leaving only three satellites remaining in orbit. Amos-6, a large Ka- and Ku-band satellite from Israel Aerospace Industries, was destroyed in the Sept. 1 pre-launch explosion of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

“This is the first time we are purchasing a U.S.-manufactured satellite. It was mainly based on the tight time schedule that we have to bring the satellite into the orbit, and Boeing can provide it to us at the right time,” Keret said. “It is planned to be 24 months.”

Amos-17 is planned for launch in 2019 and will use chemical propulsion. Boeing is building the satellite based on its 702 satellite product line, with which the company has moved away from distinct classifications. Whereas Boeing would have previously designated the 8.5-kilowatt Amos-17 a 702MP, or Medium Power, Boeing now describes the 702 series simply as a “scalable product line.”

Mark Spiwak, president for Boeing Satellite Systems International, said the evolution of the 702 series, taking advantage of new technologies like additive manufacturing, is part of the reason why the company can build satellites fast enough to meet deadlines like those of Spacecom.

“We are simplifying and reducing the complexity of all of our spacecraft systems, which provides our customers with a lower-cost system, quicker delivery and improved first-time quality,” Spiwak told SpaceNews Dec. 22. “One way is by enhancing commonality in our satellite platforms with a scalable 702 product line.”

Boeing announced four commercial satellite deals in 2016 — two with ViaSat for the first two ViaSat-3 satellites, one with Cayman Islands-based Global IP for GiSAT, and now Spacecom’s Amos-17. While manufacturers have continued to complain that 2015 and 2016 have both been slow years for the industry in general, Spiwak said the absence of Ex-Im Bank is still being felt on top of this trend.

“We know of more than five non-U.S. satellite sales over the past three years valued at nearly $1 billion that have utilized French and Canadian export credit support. At least three of these sales have closed since the Ex-Im Bank was shuttered, one of which went to a U.S. competitor precisely because of the inability to access export credit through the U.S.,” he said.

“Not all satellite sales require export-credit financing, but for the customers who need export credit, there are few alternatives,” Spiwak added.

Amos-17 carries a more diverse payload than the Amos-5, which featured a large C-band beam for Africa and three Ku-band beams reaching Europe and the Middle East. Keret said the Boeing-built satellite will have much more high-throughput satellite (HTS) capacity for both broadband and broadcast services, with a footprint over the same region.

“This satellite is taking into account the HTS future, therefore we are talking about multiband high-throughput beams on all three bands: Ku, C and Ka,” he said.

Keret said Amos-17’s Ku-band capacity will focus mainly on television broadcasting, while the C- and Ka-band beams will be prioritized for data, VSAT connectivity and cellular backhaul. Amos-17 will have both traditional regional beams and narrower HTS spot beams. Amos-17’s Ka-band capacity will cover all three regions, while its C- and Ku-band capacity will be reserved solely Africa.

Keret said the name change from chronological numbering to orbital position — Amos-17 will be located at 17 degrees east in geostationary orbit — was in part to break away from the pattern of bad luck Spacecom has had with Amos-5 and Amos-6. Spacecom has yet to decide on a replacement for Amos-6, but is borrowing the Ku-band payload on AsiaSat-8 starting in January as a placeholder for four to five years.

[Via Satellite 12-21-2016] Israel-based Spacecom announced it will buy a satellite from Boeing Satellite Systems International for $161 million, Reuters has reported. The new satellite, Amos 17, would be aimed at expanding and growing Spacecom’s coverage in Africa, Middle East and Europe.

The company expects Amos 17 would launch in 2019 and have a life expectancy of 15 years. The new satellite contract comes as contact with its Amos 5 satellite, launched in 2011, was lost last year, and its Amos 6 satellite was destroyed in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket explosion last September.

Spacecom is still in negotiations with Beijing Xinwei Technology Group, which was planning to buy the company for $285 million, and then reduced the amount to approximately $190 million after the loos of Amos 6.

The new personnel would focus on commercial space issues at the behest of Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor who supported Trump during the campaign and is now advising the incoming president, out of concerns that the current landing team was too focused on “legacy” space projects.

The Trump transition team has yet to formally announce any new members, and any additional personnel would have only a few weeks to work before the transition teams formally disband on Jan. 20. [Wall Street Journal]

Israeli satellite operator Spacecom is purchasing a new satellite from Boeing. The company announced Wednesday that it is purchasing the Amos-17 satellite from Boeing for $161 million. The satellite, scheduled for launch in 2019, is designed to provide coverage in the Middle East, Africa and Europe. Spacecom’s Amos-6 satellite was lost in a Falcon 9 pad explosion in September, and its Amos-5 satellite failed in orbit in 2015. [Reuters]

A Japanese team in the Google Lunar X Prize competition will hitch a ride to the moon with an Indian competitor. Team Hakuto announced Tuesday that the X Prize Foundation had verified its agreement to fly with TeamIndus, an Indian team that already has a contract to launch its lander on a PSLV rocket in late 2017. Team Hakuto had planned to fly its rover to the moon with Astrobotic, but Astrobotic has decided to withdraw from the competition, concluding that the current prize deadlines are unrealistic. Hakuto will retain its agreement to fly another rover with Astrobotic on its 2019 mission. [SpaceNews]

Avanti has chosen to refinance, rather than sell, the company. The London-based satellite operator said a $242 million refinancing package will be enough to keep the company operating through the launch next year of Hylas-4, which the company hopes will generate enough additional revenue to sustain the company in the long term. Avanti did receive several offers to buy the company, including from Inmarsat, but the company’s board concluded those offers undervalued Avanti. [SpaceNews]

NOAA believes small satellites could serve as gap fillers for weather data. NOAA officials said last week they are looking at several options for using small satellites, including equipping them with microwave and infrared sounders as well as visible and infrared cameras. Those small satellites could provide data that, while not of the same quality as larger satellites, could be good enough to mitigate potential gaps in coverage caused by delays in larger satellite programs. [SpaceNews]

SpaceX could benefit from a proposed rail line at Port Canaveral. The rail line would extend from Port Canaveral through Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Kennedy Space Center to link with the Florida East Coast Railway. That rail line, Port Canaveral officials say, could benefit space companies in the area, in particular SpaceX, which could use it to transport rocket stages rather than moving them by road. [Orlando Sentinel]

JERUSALEM (Reuters) — Israeli satellite operator Space Communications said on Wednesday it would launch a new telecommunications satellite in 2019 after losing a prior one in an explosion.

Spacecom said it was buying a satellite from Boeing Satellite Systems International for $161 million.

The new satellite, Amos-17, is aimed at expanding and strengthening Spacecom’s coverage of growing satellite service markets in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, it said.

Amos-17 is designed to operate for more than 15 years.

“It will be a catalyst for Spacecom’s growth plans over the next decade,” the company said in a statement.

Spacecom last year lost contact with its Amos-5 satellite, which was launched in 2011 and provided coverage to clients in Africa.

It had planned to launch Amos-6 on Sept. 3 but two days before the scheduled launch an explosion destroyed both the satellite and a Falcon 9 rocket belonging to Elon Musk’s SpaceX during preparations for a routine test firing at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Amos-6 was going to be used by Facebook to expand Internet access in Africa.

Spacecom is in negotiations to be sold to Beijing Xinwei Technology Group, which in August said its planned $285 million bid was conditional on the successful launch of Amos-6.

Beijing Xinwei said last month the purchase price had been lowered to about $190 million.

Israel’s Eurocom Holdings owns 64 percent of Spacecom, whose shares were up 3.6 percent in afternoon trading in Tel Aviv but are down some 70 percent since Amos-6 was destroyed.
(Reporting by Steven Scheer; Editing by Mark Potter)

JERUSALEM (Reuters) — Israeli satellite operator Space Communications said on Wednesday it would launch a new telecommunications satellite in 2019 after losing a prior one in an explosion.

Spacecom said it was buying a satellite from Boeing Satellite Systems International for $161 million.

The new satellite, Amos-17, is aimed at expanding and strengthening Spacecom’s coverage of growing satellite service markets in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, it said.

Amos-17 is designed to operate for more than 15 years.

“It will be a catalyst for Spacecom’s growth plans over the next decade,” the company said in a statement.

Spacecom last year lost contact with its Amos-5 satellite, which was launched in 2011 and provided coverage to clients in Africa.

It had planned to launch Amos-6 on Sept. 3 but two days before the scheduled launch an explosion destroyed both the satellite and a Falcon 9 rocket belonging to Elon Musk’s SpaceX during preparations for a routine test firing at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Amos-6 was going to be used by Facebook to expand Internet access in Africa.

Spacecom is in negotiations to be sold to Beijing Xinwei Technology Group, which in August said its planned $285 million bid was conditional on the successful launch of Amos-6.

Beijing Xinwei said last month the purchase price had been lowered to about $190 million.

Israel’s Eurocom Holdings owns 64 percent of Spacecom, whose shares were up 3.6 percent in afternoon trading in Tel Aviv but are down some 70 percent since Amos-6 was destroyed.
(Reporting by Steven Scheer; Editing by Mark Potter)

If you believe the hype, print in 3D will transform the way we manufacture everything on the planet, putting the power to create in the hands of ordinary people.

Of course, the process itself is nothing new. 3D printing has been around for 30 years and is an expensive process on an industrial scale. There are many different methods, but all the options to print in 3D take a computer model and build it up layer by layer, fusing dust particles or melting polymers to create a solid object.

Print in 3D: a revived interest

The current interest in print in 3D has arrived thanks to devices like the Makerbot. They may be cruder than their industrial cousins, creating layers by squeezing molten plastic through a nozzle, but they are relatively inexpensive. Suddenly, 3D printing is realistic for thousands of hobbyists.

UK-based artist Brendan Dawes is one designer who was immediately bitten by the 3D printing bug. "The idea that you could have a machine at home that could make things appear out of nothing seemed full of possibilities," he explains. "I'd known about rapid prototyping for a long time but now it was possible to own a machine for around £1000 and print physical objects."

A machine at home that could make things appear out of nothing

Nick Allen of 3DPrint-UK agrees that reduced set-up costs are bringing new opportunities: "Designers can get their projects manufactured without having to outlay thousands of pounds tooling up." For Nick, the process compares to podcasts and blogging, providing a platform for raw talent. "It's a way of getting noticed. In future some of our most iconic designs will have begun life on a 3D Printer."

With new developments being announced every day, we've gathered 10 of our favourite 3D creations, hailing from hi-tech University labs to amateur garage setups. So, what will you make?

A fully-functioning 3D printed camera is impressive enough by itself, but what's really amazing about Amos Dudley's design (you can inspect it in detail below) is that it boasts a 3D printed lens, made using clear resin and a technique called stereolithography.

It took two months of testing and prototyping to create the SLO - much of which was focused on getting the lens right - and you can see how it was made, as well as some of the photos taken with it, here. It's still early days for 3D printed cameras and actually printing one yourself might be a bit of a tall order right now, but it's an exciting use of the technology.

This isn't a 3D printing project for the faint-hearted. A stunning 1:1 scale replica of the Widow's Kiss gun from this year's smash hit online game, Overwatch, it's built out of around 40 parts, requires 1425 grams of filament and will take roughly 122 hours to print, and that's before you even think about putting it all together.

The best bit about it? Just like the in-game version, this Widow's Kiss converts from an assault weapon into a four-and-a-half foot sniper rifle, and features movable shrouds, telescoping barrel sections, a fold down rear sight, and collapsible main scope. Thankfully, its creator Indigenous Effects has provided a must-have guide that'll help you put everything together.

It was love at first sight for this Nuke lamp. Created by Italian designer Luca Veneri, with its complex surfaces created using real fluid dynamics simulations. The lamp consists of 2 parts and is currently available to purchase at a price of... wait for it... €1369.62. If only we could win the lottery!

Paleontology has been using the same, solid tools for around 150 years. However, Dr. Kenneth Lacovara of Drexel University decided it was time for the art of digging up dinosaur bones to catch up with technology.

Palentologists can now use the required skills to print in 3D to make replicas of their bone findings to send to doctors and scientists around the world. This way, the discovery can be truly researched without restrictions.

3dMarvels is a great site to look at for all things 3D; showcasing new 3D printed designs weekly, the site also explains how the model was created. Their latest collaborator Michael designed and printed this stunning replica of the Mars Rover.

This is one 3D printing creation that we'd have on our desk any day! The sculpture only took an impressive five hours to print in 3D, and was printed at .1 mm layer height with a 10% honeycomb fill. Created by Jonathan Wong, you can gain the instructions from his website and make a Yoda of your very own! Have fun you will.

Print in 3D: Colours are seasonal, so be quick if some take your fancy!

This adorable egg cup was crafted by dutch designer Gijs de Zwart. Since graduating from the Delft University of Technology back in 1999, Gijs set up StudioGijs which is where his 3D prints come to life. These egg cups are printed on demand in laser sintered polyamide and come in packs of 4. You can buy yours from Shapeways.

Have you ever wanted to eat your own face? Well, thanks to print in 3D, now you can! The 'Eat Your Face Machine' (EYFM) is a 3D printer developed by David Carr and the MIT Media Lab. The EYFM scans your face and then recreates it onto a block of chocolate. The end result being your face, in chocolate, ready to eat. NOM!

3D printing has become a lot more affordable in days of late. Thankfully, that means that more of you will be able to craft your own 3D creations including these customised iPhone cases. If that sounds a little daunting, head on over to designers Polychemy, where you can choose your style, colour and name for your smartphone case.

We've just shown you Polychemy's iPhone cases but get a load of their diversity with this incredible demon girl sculpture. The designer Andrew Baker already has an impressive portfolio, having worked on the likes of District 9 and Peter Jackson's The Hobbit. The sculpture is currently available to buy for $207.

Brazilian footwear company Melissas caught the 3D printing bug and have been creating incredible fashion designs ever since. The shoes are made out of a proprietary plastic called Melflex using injection-molding and 3D printing. Any left over material is saved and used for the next print in 3D project, so the process is nice and green! These invisible shoes were created by Andreia Chaves.

Print in 3D: Like Minded Studio created this stunning typography piece

This is one of the most stunning examples of print in 3D that we've come across. Combining typography and pirates, this creation was designed by Luca Ionescu of Sydney based design studio Like Minded Studio. The piece was started using a simple pencil design, then Illustrator for finishing the type and ornaments, and the 3D modeling in Cinema 4DXL via SLS printing.

Print in 3D: The international sign for 'call me' made flesh (well, plastic anyway)

If you're always losing your phone, this could be the answer. Glove One is the brainchild of Milwaukee artist Bryan Cera. As part of his Master of Arts, Cera created the fully operational gauntlet using a 3D printer and recycled circuitry. Slot in your SIM card, dial the number on your fingers and then talk to the hand - literally. Cera plans on releasing the plans for Glove One later in the year.

Talk about progressive rock. The Spider 3D guitar was created by Olaf Diegel, rock 'n' roll fan and professor of mechatronics at Auckland's Massey University. The elaborate webbing, complete with three-dimensional spiders running around the open casing, is printed as a single component and can be customised to fit any guitar neck. Of course, arachnophobes looking to print in 3D may prefer the Scarab guitar festooned with butterflies, dragonflies and flowers.

Neemesh Patel, aka Psychobob, is gaining a reputation for creating insanely detailed models of gaming and movie icons. First there was the USB-powered Rig Helmet from Dead Space, then the Light Cycle from Tron: Legacy, both of which Psychobob gave away to friends. His next project is going nowhere and who can blame him. This incredibly detailed model of Atlas from Portal 2 was designed in Modo and printed by Shapeways, a UK company specialising in on-demand print in 3D.

Print in 3D: Imagine what Frankenstein would have done with 3D Printing

Yes, you read that right. Not only can 3D Printing create guitars, robots and phones it can produce full-size, see-through children. Weighing in at 10kg, the macabre maquette is a fantastic example of what 3D printing can do. In days gone by the underlying skeleton would have been built and then encased in the amber-like transparent. Today, the entire model is printing in one piece. Impressive, but we don't want to know why it has no legs.

While plastic swimwear is unlikely to be the look of 2012, Continuum Fashion's N12 bikini could be a glimpse into the future of fashion. Thousands of circular plates, connected by minuscule springs, are printed in 3D using Nylon 12, a solid but flexible polymer. Not only is Nylon 12 completely waterproof, the designers insist it becomes more comfortable the wetter it gets. In time, the process could be refined to create perfect fits for any shape and size using body-scanning.

Thanks to print in 3D you don't have to be a zombie to enjoy snacking on brains - even if they're your own. Designers at Intion used a MRI scan of their co-founder's brain to create a solid 3D model. This in turn was used to manufacture a latex mould that was filed with melted chocolate. After three hours in the fridge, the creepy candy was ready for Andy Millns to sample. Yummy!

What if you wanted to create confectionery based on body parts and didn't want to bother with moulds? Researchers at Cornell University's Creative Machines Lab have developed a printer that uses liquid ingredients such as batter or cheese instead of plastic. Fancy a scallop in the shape of the space shuttle ready to deep fry? No problem. A cake with a hidden message printed on the inside? Simple.

While Cornell's printer is still in the prototype stage, a team from the University of Exeter already claims to have perfected a 3D chocolate printer for customisable treats.

Proving that you don't need an industrial printer to create something amazing, a 3D enthusiast by the handle of 'Sublime' has created a fully operational lathe on Tantillus, the open-sourced printer he designed himself. Of course, a lathe made of plastic wears out pretty quickly, which is why Sublime printed it using PLA polyesters. As PLAs are derived from renewable resources such as sugarcane and corn starch, broken parts can easily be composted. Clever and green to boot.

Michael "Skimbal" Curry's impressive Arc Reactor from Iron Man almost made our list, as did his recreation of Thor's mighty hammer, Mjolnir. Then we spotted these little guys. Based on Mario Cart's spiked shells, Skimbal's has made him 3D models freely available so you can make your own Koopa racer. Print out the individual blocks that snap together to form the shell along with the wheel spokes and internal gears, add the innards of a radio-controlled car and you're all set. Mamma-Mia.

Print in 3D: What other printable body parts will follow this titanium jaw?

3D Printing isn't just about fun and games. If you don't believe us, ask the 83-year-old Belgian woman who can speak and chew thanks to her new printed jaw. Working with Professor Jules Poukens of the University of Hasselt, medical implant experts, Xilloc printed a 170g titanium copy of her original lower jawbone based on MRI scans. The match was so perfect that the patient was able to talk and swallow normally just 24-hours after it was implanted.

Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and a Mars colonization evangelist, may face a big snag in his dream to bathe the globe in high-speed internet: the Chinese military.

On November 15, SpaceX asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for permission to launch 4,425 internet-providing satellites. That is hundreds more satellites than currently orbit Earth, including the dead ones.

But as far back as January 2015, when Musk first debuted his global internet project at a new SpaceX satellite factory in Seattle, he noted how China could pose a significant hurdle for his plans.

The Chinese government would have to agree to let SpaceX build antenna dishes, or ground links, to send and receive data to and from the company's spacecraft. But that nation routes internet access for its 1.37 billion inhabitants through "the Great Firewall," a censorship technology that blocks foreign news, mentions of citizen uprisings (like the Tiananmen Square Massacre), or anything else Chinese officials don't like on the web.

"Obviously, any given country can say it's illegal to have a ground link. [...] And from our standpoint we could conceivably continue to broadcast," Musk said during the event. "I mean, I'm hopeful that we can structure agreements with various countries to allow communication with their citizens, but it is on a country-by-country basis."

But what if SpaceX continued to broadcast uncensored internet over China, despite not being given permission?

"If they get upset with us, they can blow our satellites up, which wouldn't be good," Musk said. "China can do that. So probably we shouldn't broadcast there."

Satellite killers

Musk has good reason to fear the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of China.

In January 2007, the PLA launched a "kinetic kill vehicle" — the space equivalent of a giant bullet — atop a mobile, multi-stage rocket.

The target was an old Chinese weather satellite called Feng Yun-1C (FY-1C), and the head-on collision between the two objects happened at roughly 18,000 mph (8 km per second).

It was an impressive, if frightening, demonstration that echoed the US military's anti-satellite test of October 1985. That US satellite-killing exercise blasted an old solar observatory called Solwind into more than 280 pieces.

In the case of China's 2007 anti-satellite test, however, the impact created nearly 4,000 new detectable chunks of space debris.

Hundreds of pieces of FY-1C have slowed down enough to burn up in Earth's atmosphere, but some 3,438 roughly softball-size pieces are still zooming around the planet at speeds of thousands of miles per hour. What's more, according to Space News, roughly half of those chunks will stay in orbit until 2027.

There may also be as many as 35,000 fingernail-size bits of FY-1C debris circling the Earth which — like so many tiny bullets — even the most advanced ground radar stations can't track, according to Popular Mechanics.

FY-1C's trash is just one source of space junk, though. Decades of launching artificial satellites into orbit has created an orbiting field of trash that NASA scientists fear is reaching a "critical density": when more junk is being created than is falling out of the sky.

So even if China doesn't exercise its satellite-killing capabilities, which it has continued to develop, SpaceX will have to confront the persistent threat of space junk smacking into its giant constellation of internet satellites — and creating even more of a threat if that happens.

How SpaceX's global internet might work

According to a database compiled by the Union of Concerned Scientists, 1,419 active satellites are currently orbiting Earth. Roughly 2,600 satellites that no longer work are thought to be floating in space, but even factoring those in, SpaceX's planned fleet would be larger than everything already in space.

Some of the biggest telecommunications satellites can weigh several tons, be the size of a bus, and orbit from a fixed point about 22,000 miles, or 35,000 kilometers, above Earth.

According to SpaceX's FCC application, though, it seems these won't be typical telecommunications satellites.

Each satellite in SpaceX's planned constellation will weigh about 850 pounds, or 386 kilograms, and be roughly the size of a MINI Cooper car. They will orbit at altitudes ranging from 715 miles (1,150 km) to 790 miles (1,275 km).

From this lofty vantage point, SpaceX says, each satellite could cover an ellipse about 1,300 miles (2,120 km) wide. That's about the distance from Maine to the Florida panhandle.

"The system is designed to provide a wide range of broadband and communications services for residential, commercial, institutional, governmental and professional users worldwide," SpaceX wrote in its application.

SpaceX's filing with the FCC outlines a two-phase launch plan.

To get the party started, SpaceX wants to send up 1,600 satellites at one orbital altitude, then follow up with another 2,825 satellites placed in four shells at different altitudes.

"With deployment of the first 800 satellites, SpaceX will be able to provide widespread U.S. and international coverage for broadband services," SpaceX wrote. "Once fully optimized through the Final Deployment, the system will be able to provide high bandwidth (up to 1 Gbps per user), low latency broadband services for consumers and businesses in the U.S. and globally."

During his January 2015 talk, Musk said the full system "would be $10 or $15 billion to create, maybe more. Then, the user terminals will be at least $100 to $300 depending on which type of terminal."

And it's all a means to an end.

"This is intended to be a significant amount of revenue and help fund a city on Mars," he said.

Turbo speeds

A speed of 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) globally would be huge.

The global average for internet speed per user in late 2015, according Akamai's "State of the Internet" report, was 5.1 Mbps second — about 200 times slower than SpaceX's target — with most of the higher speeds tied up in cable and fiber-optic connections.

SpaceX also makes the point in its filing's legal statement that, according to a July report by UNESCO's Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, "4.2 billion people (or 57% of the world’s population) are offline for a wide range of reasons, but often also because the necessary connectivity is not present or not affordable."

Bathing the planet in internet is one way to get those people online.

Here are some more details directly from SpaceX's filing, which are notable:

High capacity: Each satellite in the SpaceX System provides aggregate downlink capacity to users ranging from 17 to 23 Gbps, depending on the gain of the user terminal involved. Assuming an average of 20 Gbps, the 1600 satellites in the Initial Deployment would have a total aggregate capacity of 32 Tbps. SpaceX will periodically improve the satellites over the course of the multi-year deployment of the system, which may further increase capacity.

High adaptability: The system leverages phased array technology to dynamically steer a large pool of beams to focus capacity where it is needed. Optical inter-satellite links permit flexible routing of traffic on-orbit. Further, the constellation ensures that frequencies can be reused effectively across different satellites to enhance the flexibility and capacity and robustness of the overall system.

Broadband services: The system will be able to provide broadband service at speeds of up to 1 Gbps per end user. The system's use of low-Earth orbits will allow it to target latencies of approximately 25-35 ms.

Worldwide coverage: With deployment of the first 800 satellites, the system will be able to provide U.S. and international broadband connectivity; when fully deployed, the system will add capacity and availability at the equator and poles for truly global coverage.

Low cost: SpaceX is designing the overall system from the ground up with cost- effectiveness and reliability in mind, from the design and manufacturing of the space and ground-based elements, to the launch and deployment of the system using SpaceX launch services, development of the user terminals, and end-user subscription rates.

Ease of use: SpaceX's phased-array user antenna design will allow for a low-profile user terminal that is easy to mount and operate on walls or roofs.

Lifespan: The satellites will last between 5 years and 7 years and decay within a year after that.

Musk first discussed the unnamed satellite constellation project back in January of last year, later filing for an FCC application to test basic technologies that would support it.

"The focus is going to be on creating a global communications system. This is quite an ambitious effort. We're really talking about something which is, in the long term, like rebuilding the Internet in space. The goal will be to have the majority of long distance Internet traffic go over this network and about 10% of local consumer and business traffic. So that's, still probably 90% of people's local access will still come from fiber but we'll do about 10% business to consumer direct and more than half of the long distance traffic."

According to a June 2015 story by Christian Davenport at The Washington Post, Google and Fidelity invested $1 billion into Musk's company, in part to support the project. So it's a good guess that if and when the network becomes functional, those companies would partly assume control of it. (Google's parent company, Alphabet, is also working on its own effort to beam internet connectivity from the skies using satellites, balloons, and drones.)

The filing comes just two months after a SpaceX rocket exploded during a routine launchpad test. It was carrying the $200 million AMOS-6 satellite, which Facebook intended to license to beam free internet to parts of Africa.

SpaceX declined to comment or provide more details on the project, including its projected timeline and how the satellites would be launched (presumably through Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets).

According to a database compiled by the Union of Concerned Scientists, there are 1,419 active satellites currently orbiting Earth. There are estimates of roughly 2,600 satellites that no longer work floating in space, but even factoring those in, SpaceX's planned fleet would be larger than everything already in space.

Some of the biggest telecommunications satellites can weigh several tons, be the size of a bus, and orbit from a fixed point about 22,000 miles (35,000 km) above Earth.

After we took a look at SpaceX's FCC application, though, it seems these won't be your typical telecommunications satellites.

Each satellite in SpaceX's planned constellation will weigh about 850 lbs (386 kg) and be roughly the size of a MINI Cooper car. They will orbit at altitudes ranging from 715 miles (1,150 km) to 790 miles (1,275 km).

From this lofty vantage point, SpaceX says each satellite could cover an ellipse about 1,300 miles (2,120 km) wide. That's about the size of the state of Rhode Island.

"The system is designed to provide a wide range of broadband and communications services for residential, commercial, institutional, governmental and professional users worldwide," SpaceX wrote in its application.

SpaceX's filing with the FCC outlines a two-phase launch plan.

To get the party started, SpaceX wants to send up 1,600 satellites at one orbital altitude, then follow up with another 2,825 satellites placed in four shells at different altitudes.

"With deployment of the first 800 satellites, SpaceX will be able to provide widespread U.S. and international coverage for broadband services," SpaceX wrote. "Once fully optimized through the Final Deployment, the system will be able to provide high bandwidth (up to 1 Gbps per user), low latency broadband services for consumers and businesses in the U.S. and globally."

Turbo speeds

A speed of 1 Gbps globally would be huge.

The global average for internet speed in late 2015, according Akamai's "State of the Internet" report, was 5.1 Mbps per user — about 200 times slower than SpaceX's target — with most of the higher speeds tied up in cable and fiberoptic connections.

SpaceX also makes the point in its filing's legal statement that, according to a July 2016 report by UNESCO's Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, "4.2 billion people (or 57% of the world’s population) are offline for a wide range of reasons, but often also because the necessary connectivity is not present or not affordable."

Bathing the planet in internet is one way to get those people online.

Here are some more details directly from SpaceX's filing, which are notable:

High capacity: Each satellite in the SpaceX System provides aggregate downlink capacity to users ranging from 17 to 23 Gbps, depending on the gain of the user terminal involved. Assuming an average of 20 Gbps, the 1600 satellites in the Initial Deployment would have a total aggregate capacity of 32 Tbps. SpaceX will periodically improve the satellites over the course of the multi-year deployment of the system, which may further increase capacity.

High adaptability: The system leverages phased array technology to dynamically steer a large pool of beams to focus capacity where it is needed. Optical inter-satellite links permit flexible routing of traffic on-orbit. Further, the constellation ensures that frequencies can be reused effectively across different satellites to enhance the flexibility and capacity and robustness of the overall system.

Broadband services: The system will be able to provide broadband service at speeds of up to 1 Gbps per end user. The system’s use of low-Earth orbits will allow it to target latencies of approximately 25-35 ms.

Worldwide coverage: With deployment of the first 800 satellites, the system will be able to provide U.S. and international broadband connectivity; when fully deployed, the system will add capacity and availability at the equator and poles for truly global coverage.

Low cost: SpaceX is designing the overall system from the ground up with cost- effectiveness and reliability in mind, from the design and manufacturing of the space and ground-based elements, to the launch and deployment of the system using SpaceX launch services, development of the user terminals, and end-user subscription rates.

Ease of use: SpaceX’s phased-array user antenna design will allow for a low-profile user terminal that is easy to mount and operate on walls or roofs.

The satellites will last between 5 years and 7 years and decay within a year after that.

Musk first discussed the unnamed satellite constellation project back in January 2015, later filing for an FCC application to test basic technologies that'd support it.

According to a June 2015 story by Christian Davenport at The Washington Post, Musk said the project "would be like rebuilding the Internet in space."

Davenport also noted that Google and Fidelity invested $1 billion into Musk's company, in part to support the project, so it's a good guess that if and when the network becomes functional, those companies would partly assume control of it. (Google parent company Alphabet is also working on its own effort to beam internet connectivity from the skies using satellites, balloons and drones.)

The filing comes just two months after a SpaceX rocket exploded during a routine launchpad test. It was carrying the $200 million AMOS-6 satellite, which Facebook intended to license to beam free internet to parts of Africa.

Business Insider contacted SpaceX for more details on the project, including its projected timeline and how the satellites would be launched (presumably through Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets), but representatives did not immediately answer our questions.

Terry Francona is one of the best managers I’ve ever seen and easily one of the best dudes I have ever spoken. Again, I don’t play favorites. I’m no fan boy. They pay me to be objective, and impartial. I don’t have a favorite team. Or a favorite athlete. Or a favorite coach. Or a favorite sport. But I’d be lying if I said Terry Francona wasn’t one of my favorite people I’ve come across over the last 25 years of doing this. He is an unbelievable manager. And an even better guy. And although none of us could ever do what he does, unless Tony La Russa or Bruce Bochy are listening, he’s just like all of us. Case in point.

After going up 3 games to 1, Tito went back to his hotel room and said he couldn’t fall out. Who can’t relate to that? Is there anyone, anywhere, who doesn’t have trouble sleeping. Well, other than those of you who did what i told you to do, get yourself a Casper mattress. Because the key to have an incredible day is to get a great night of sleep. But still, most people I know have trouble sleeping. Especially on a business trip, in a hotel room. So what you would do? Take a sleeping pill? Maybe. But more likely, and I know I would, you’re reaching for the menu for in room dining; and you’re going on a late night grub bender: you’re looking for comfort food. Or if you’re Terry Francona, you’re skipping to the bottom of the menu, and you’re getting blasted. On sugar. My man ordered $44 dollars worth of ice cream. Oh hell yeah! I’ve never wanted to say this as much as I do right now, but…i…see…you…working!! Can’t tell you how many times, I’ve sat in a hotel room, hyped on what I had to do the next day, unable to dial down, and ended up hammering a kingsize snickers or a bag of famous amos cookies. Or both.

So I absolutely see this guy. Problem with it is, and while I’ve never actually done crack, it’s probably a little like that: like crack, once that vanilla ice cream hits your bloodstream, there probably is this unbelievable temporary feeling of euphoria, where you no longer have a care or worry in the world. But inevitably, you come off that ice cream high like you do a crack high, and the loathing and self-hate overwhelm you. You’re ashamed, and you hate yourself because you said you would never do it again. Yet here you are. At the end of another destructive bender. At the bottom of another bowl of ice cream. And not only do you feel horrible psychologically, but those decisions obviously take a toll on you physically: and Tito admits, coming off the rails in the middle of the night and throwing 44 bucks at ice cream was not the right call: “I can’t do this. I would say from 5 am to 7 am, it was not a pleasant experience.” Of course not. It never is. Just like the time you slammed 17 grape popsciles, skip. Remember that.

But I’m not here to judge. In fact, I’m here to say, after a story like that, the legend of Terry Francona continues to grow. Because every last one of us can relate to that: every last one of us has done that. So while we could never ever do what Terry Francona does, he just did what everyone last one of us has done. And I have never liked or admired this man more than I do right now, and he was already one of my favorites. And finish the Cubs, and win a World Series in both Boston and Cleveland, and this game has never seen a greater icon than Terry Francona. I’m not sure the planet has. Go get it skip and thanks for keeping it so real.

While the skirmish dates back more than a decade, lawmakers began sparring over issues central to each company's interests in the past week — just days after SpaceX founder Elon Musk debuted his bold vision for colonizing Mars.

On September 27, Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO), who represents the district where ULA is headquartered, penned a four-page congressional letter with nine other House Republicans and sent it to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), NASA, and the US Air Force (USAF).

"These failures could have spelled disaster, even loss of life, had critical national security payloads or NASA crew been aboard those rockets," the letter states. "Both SpaceX failures occurred after the Air Force certified the Falcon 9 launch vehicle for US national security launches, less than fifteen months ago."

But on Tuesday, October 4, a larger, bipartisan group of 24 members of Congress delivered a strong rebuttal. Their letter urges the FAA, NASA, and USAF to stay the course.

"Accidents are unfortunate events, and accident investigations should not be politicized. We encourage you to reject calls for your organizations to abandon established, well considered, and long standing procedures," states the letter, led by Rep. Bill Flores (R-TX), whose district includes a large SpaceX facility.

Beyond any convictions about how the commercial space industry should work, and what constitutes appropriate use of taxpayer dollars, lobbyist spending seems to be driving the latest feud.

A sizable cut of that money, according to data gathered by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics (which tracks federal campaign contributions and lobbying efforts on its website opensecrets.org), has ended up in the campaign coffers of many lawmakers who seem to be fighting on the companies' behalves.

The latest volleys in a long space battle

The rivalry between the rocket-launching companies goes back at least a decade.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin used to compete against each other for military launch contracts, but in 2005 they announced their plan to lay down arms and form a joint rocket-launching business: ULA.

At the time, SpaceX was just 3-year-old rocket company with few launches under its belt — and a lot to prove. Regardless, it sued Boeing and Lockheed Martin in October 2005 in an attempt to block ULA's formation under antitrust law.

A judge dismissed SpaceX's lawsuit in February 2006. The FTC then approved the joint venture in October 2006, expressing that, while it was concerned about "anticompetitive harm", the Pentagon needed "assured access to space" and ULA was the only real option.

Over the next 8 years, Musk's aerospace company matured its Falcon 9 rocket design, figured out how to build rocket boosters that can land themselves at sea, bagged contracts with telecommunications satellite providers, and worked toward winning NASA contracts to resupply the space station (and eventually launch people into space).

Crucially, it also launched two out of three certification flights the US Air Force required to compete with ULA for Pentagon contracts.

But in September 2013, when SpaceX says it was "just days away" from its third and final certification flight, the Air Force quietly inked a contract with ULA to fly its next 36 launches.

SpaceX sued the government over the deal in April 2014, detailing its rationale in a press release:

"Since the merger, not only have there been no savings but costs have skyrocketed. Vehicle costs are up from approximately $100M per vehicle to $400M per vehicle—making ULA's launch vehicles the most expensive not just in the US, but the world. In addition, the United States pays ULA nearly $1 billion dollars per year just to maintain the ability to launch—regardless of whether or not they launch a single rocket.

...

"To be clear, SpaceX is not seeking to be awarded any launch contracts. We are simply seeking the opportunity to compete—and not just for SpaceX, but for any qualified company. If we compete and we lose, that's ok too."

Another flash point for SpaceX vs. Boeing-Lockheed-ULA involved a government rule limiting the use of Russian-made RD-180 engines, which are powerful devices that ULA uses to propel heavy military satellites into orbit.

While Russia aggressively annexed Crimea in Ukraine, SpaceX lobbied intensely to have the engines banned after 2019 in a re-authorization of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Since SpaceX makes its own rocket engines, passage of the rule might have guaranteed its own military launch monopoly.

But Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) — to whom SpaceX contributed at least $16,500 in the latest election cycle, and who is the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee — ultimately backed down from his position that allowing the use of RD-180s would be funding "Putin's top cronies."

In a legislative compromise earlier this year, the NDAA re-authorization gave ULA permission to use 18 of the RD-180 engines on its rockets through 2022. (The much-deeper pockets of Boeing and Lockheed Martin almost certainly helped win the day.)

Amid these legal actions, SpaceX suffered two launch failures (in 2012 and 2015) and a string of anomalies at launch — giving Coffman and other politicians multiple openings to wade into the fray.

Rocket-powered lobbying

Raising issues about SpaceX, its launch failures and anomalies, and its relationship with the US government is not a first for Coffman.

As a member of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee (which oversees military spacecraft), he did so in 2014, and in 2015 on multiple occasions.

In the 2016 election cycle, SpaceX contributed money to at least half of the 24 signers of the congressional letter that responded to (and contested) Coffman's. Flores himself has taken at least $2,000, and cosigner Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) accepted at least $7,000 from SpaceX.

Flores also presides over district 17 in Texas, which is home to SpaceX's 4,000-acre rocket development facility in the town of McGregor.

"Traditional launch providers see their market being threatened by nontraditional entrants," said Loren Thompson, aerospace analyst with the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., think tank. "Basically, this is competition between launch providers over market share and money that in the political process gets related to local interests."

Business Insider contacted Rep. Coffman's press secretary as well as ULA, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin about campaign funding and other issues related to this story, but we did not immediately receive a response. Representatives from Rep. Flores' office and SpaceX also did not immediately provide a comment.

Despite the apparent turf-based lobbying war, Coffman and his colleagues are not alone in their critique of how government agencies permit SpaceX to internally lead their own mishap investigations — and, by extension, other rocket companies like Orbital ATK and ULA. (Both have chosen to lead their own investigations in recentyears.)

The June 2016 NASA OIG audit concluded that investigation wasn't independent "because 11 of the 12 voting members were SpaceX employees."

"While not required in the CRS-1 contract, this lack of independence does not meet Government best practice standards for NASA, NTSB, and USAF investigations and could impact the board's ability to identify the root cause and make corrective actions," the report read.

Musk said in a press call on September 27 that the company hasn't lost any contracts because of the incident.

"If something happens to SpaceX, it gets 100 times more press ... The public may think that our rockets fail, but actually lots of rockets fail," he told reporters. "This is a small thing on a long road. There will probably be other failures in the future."

For its ongoing investigation, SpaceX nearly doubled its team to a core group of "around 20 people," of which "more than half are representatives from FAA, NASA, US Air Force and industry experts," a company spokesperson previously told Business Insider in an email.

Leading the entire group is Hans Koenigsmann — SpaceX's vice president of mission assurance.

"[W]e believe he is the best person to do so," the spokesperson said. "We are collaborating very closely with the participating agencies, sharing raw data and providing access to meetings."

"We feel strongly that the current investigation should be led by NASA and the Air Force to ensure that proper investigative engineering rigor is applied and that the outcomes are sufficient to prevent NASA and military launch mishaps in the future," the letter states.

John Taylor, a SpaceX spokesperson, declined to comment when provided a copy of the first letter.

How federal agencies responded

The first letter calls on the FAA, USAF, and NASA for their responses to the letter by October 31, 2016.

Business Insider forwarded both a draft and then a signed letter to those agencies as well as to the DoD (which is named in the letter) and asked for comment.

Hank Price, an FAA spokesperson, told Business Insider "it'd take some time to draft a response, and we wouldn't respond to it until we'd spoken to the Congressman first."

Another FAA spokesperson later told Business Insider in an email: "The FAA received the letter late Thursday afternoon and has not had a chance to review it. Safety of all operations, including commercial space, is our top priority, and the FAA is closely overseeing the accident investigation. We will respond to the members of Congress in a timely manner."

NASA representatives for the agency's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate told Business Insider in an email "we haven't officially received this, but even when we do, we wouldn't be able to comment in advance of responding."

Laura Seal, a DoD spokesperson, told Business Insider by email that the "letter is not addressed to the Department of Defense. If we do receive a letter from Congress on this topic for response, we would respond directly to the author."

Representatives at the USAF did not immediately reply.

The congressional letters

Below is the full text of the first letter, from Coffman's group on September 27:

[Via Satellite 09-29-2016] In the wake of losing the long anticipated Amos 6 satellite Sept. 1 during SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket explosion, satellite operator Spacecom has created a plan to cover lost ground as quickly as possible. Amos 6, the most advanced communications satellite ever built in Israel, was bigger than Amos 2 and Amos 3 combined, equipped with 39 beams in Ku-band and 24 high throughput Ka-band spot beams. The satellite was to support Facebook and Eutelsat in bringing internet connectivity to Africa as well as expanding Spacecom’s presence there and into Western Europe. Furthermore, the spacecraft was to replace Amos 2, which launched in 2003.

Speaking to Via Satellite, Spacecom Co-founder Jacob Keret, SVP of sales and marketing for Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, said the company is working on two projects to fill the gap created by the loss of Amos 6. The first is a temporary fix that involves finding a satellite already in orbit that can be relocated to 4 degrees west, the current location of Amos 2 and 3, and the intended location of Amos 6.

“Our first priority is to bring an in orbit replacement satellite to 4 degrees west. That is something we are exploring right now with other satellite operators, and I expect to have a clearer view about that in the next few weeks,” Keret said.

If Spacecom can find a satellite with suitable frequencies and coverage that is already in orbit, Keret said the operator would seek to use this as an interim solution to cover the two to three years time needed to rebuild the Amos 6.

“For the longer term, we have the design of Amos 6, so this is something that can be done. It’s between two to three years to complete such a satellite. So we have a two-stage program: one is to bring a replacement satellite in orbit and the other is to build a new one and bring it later,” he said, adding that Spacecom may consider modifying the design of the Amos 6 duplicate if deemed appropriate.

Spacecom’s launch insurance did not cover the loss of Amos 6, because launch insurance is only live after the launch starts, and the Sept. 1 explosion occurred about eight minutes prior to a test firing. However, Keret said the operator will not incur a massive financial loss in this regard because of other prearranged contract details.

“We are going to get all the money that we have spent for the satellite in accordance to the contract we have with the builders of the satellite, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), as well as the premiums we already paid to the insurance providers. Our shareholders and bondholders actually were not affected immediately in terms of proceeds,” he explained.

Whether other facets of the Amos 6 plan can be equally reconstructed is unclear at this point. Keret said Spacecom is still in negotiations with SpaceX regarding reimbursement, and is in discussions with Facebook and Eutelsat as to whether that deal can be reconstructed. Spacecom’s acquisition by Beijing Xinwei Group of China was also contingent upon the successful launch and in-orbit checkout of Amos 6. Keret said the satellite loss did not kill the acquisition, though it had the right to.

“Discussions are going on as we speak,” he said. “The shareholders and Xinwei have to reassess the new conditions, and I would guess that they are negotiating also about the value price of the company after the loss of Amos 6. They had the right to walk away, but they didn’t do so.”

Amos 6 is the second satellite Spacecom has lost in less than a year’s time. In November 2015, Amos 5, located at 17 degrees east, suffered a power failure and ceased communicating. The magnitude of the loss of Amos 6, however, due in part to Facebook’s involvement, has highlighted Israel’s lack of a national space policy. Keret said there is a real need for a government policy in this regard.

“[It is] something that personally I think should have been done many years ago — not connected to one satellite or another, but as a general policy. Unfortunately but fortunately, the loss of Amos 6 did initiate this process and I hope something will come out of it, but no one can guarantee this,” he said.

Despite the setback, Keret said he is still confident in the market potential of the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. Customers on Amos 2 and Amos 3 have not expressed a desire to shift elsewhere, he said, and Spacecom is continuing to provide the same services in orbit as before Sept. 1. Amos 6’s capacity was mostly spoken for, with Facebook and Eutelsat purchasing the entire Ka-band payload and two thirds of the Ku-band supply already pre-sold. Keret said Spacecom ultimately remains optimistic about the future.

“We definitely see in our areas of operations and with our customers, growth perspective. Our effort to bring this replacement satellite is to generate more revenues. We have some concrete guaranteed revenues that we can do, so the future is good,” he said.

Competing, privately owned rocket companies, many of which have announced their presence with press releases and news reports promoting their products and criticizing their competitors since the September 1st, 2016 SpaceX accident when a Falcon-9 rocket catastrophically blew up on the launch pad, provide compelling anecdotal evidence that this new industry is about to enter an intensively competitive phase.

And now, a large intellectual property focused firm has issued a report showing rocket companies perform at least one other business function common to other highly competitive and highly disruptive industries.

They collect patents to guard their intellectual property from competition and protect their bottom line from patent trolls.

Manned spaceﬂight patent activity is much larger and diverse than one would anticipate. While it’s difficult to calculate, we estimate that there are over 17,000 manned spaceﬂight inventions that have been patented since the early 1960s.

Patent flings are trending sharply upwards, particularly since China’s entry into the crewed space race. China’s frst astronaut, Yang Liwei, ﬂew aboard the Shenzhou 5 space craft on October 15, 2003, making China the third country in the world with a manned spaceﬂight program.

The fling trend is also due to increasing patent activity by private launch providers in the United States – where a clear transition from the public to private sector is currently underway.

The US, China and Russia, each with active manned spaceﬂight programs, represent three-fifths of all patent flings. Other countries, including Japan, represent only 5% of the patent activity that’s occurred in the last 5 years.

Top patent holders include NASA (mostly because of its long history, since "securing patent protection is not a core strategy of the agency"), the Boeing Company, Russian based RSC Energia (which together vie for the largest amount of recent patent applications) and the European based Airbus Group.

The SpaceX “no-IP” strategy, which makes the company unique among the firms referenced in the report, also came in for comment. According to the report, "so far, SpaceX has successfully navigated the IP minefeld, but considering the volume of information included in this study, it is likely that this test will not be the last."

The increasing amount of private patents issues as compared to government patents issued. As outlined in the report, "the shift to private sector manned spaceﬂight has seen a reversal of technical focus. Industry (once) supported government programs by supplying parts and components (guidance, electronics, life support etc.), but commerce is now fully engaged in the development of “core” space technologies such as propulsion and spacecraft design.." Graph c/o CPA Global.

PRAGUE – EchoStar Corp.’s Hughes division on May 10 said a recent consumer satellite broadband contract with the Turkish government and a combined Eutelsat/Facebook deal in Africa are just the start of the company’s ambition of replicating its U.S. success elsewhere.

EchoStar also lifted the veil, if only slightly, on its plans for a large S-band mobile communications satellite over Europe, whose launch has slipped to this summer following a rocket-related delay.

Despite the proximity of the launch and the size of the EchoStar investment in the EchoStar 21 satellite, Englewood, Colorado-based EchoStar has never spelled out exactly what business it expects to develop now that it has won European Union operating licenses.

There has never been any doubt about the consumer broadband plan: Develop North America, then head south to Central and South America before moving further afield.

Hughes expects to bring into service three new Ka-band satellites in the coming months, bringing the company’s total consumer broadband capacity in the Americas to 360 gigabits per second of throughput.

The most eagerly awaited is the EchoStar 19, also known as Jupiter 2, which will give Hughes badly needed new capacity to grow the North American consumer broadband service, which while more profitable than ever has been stuck in neutral in terms of subscriber additions.

EchoStar reported that Hughes’s North American subscribers totaled 1.038 million as of March 31, flat from Dec. 31 as most of the capacity of the two current satellites, Spaceway 3 and EchoStar 17/Jupiter 1, is booked.

Hughes reported revenue of $326 million for the here months ending March 31, flat from a year ago. But EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, was up 9 percent, to $99 million, as Hughes was able to squeeze additional earnings from its customer base by offering different subscriber plans and keeping a lid on user-terminal costs.

EchoStar 19/Jupiter 2 is scheduled for launch late this year aboard a European Ariane 5 rocket. The satellite’s entry into service will trigger the start of a recently signed contract with Global Eagle Entertainment (GEE) of Los Angeles, which provides satellite connectivity to business and commercial aircraft.

The GEE deal was Hughes’s first in the fast-growing aeronautical connectivity sector. Hughes President Pradman P. Kaul said Hughes’s aeronautical modem can deliver 200 megabits per second of throughput per aircraft.

Hughes has leased Ka-band capacity aboard satellites owned by Eutelsat of Paris and Telesat of Canada in an attempt to replicate its U.S. success in Central and South America, notably Brazil.

The Eutelsat 65 West A satellite, launched in March, should be in service this summer and provide 24 gigabits per second of throughput for Hughes’s Brazil consumer broadband service. The Telesat 19 Vantage satellite, scheduled for launch in mid-2018, will provide 31 gigabits per second of throughput from 63 degrees west.

In a May 10 conference call with investors, Kaul said the company has been focusing on satellite broadband in the Americas but has already won numerous contracts for Ka-band consumer broadband ground networks.

Two recent wins were in Turkey and Africa. The Turkish government has expanded an earlier contract with Hughes for a Jupiter ground network that will be double the territory covered by the previous contract. The network connects with Turkey’s Turksat 4B satellite’s Ka-band payload.

More recently, Eutelsat and social-media giant Facebook, which are cooperating in deploying an initial satellite broadband service in sub-Saharan Africa, selected Hughes for the ground infrastructure, including the ground terminals.

The decision was surprising insofar as Eutelsat is creating a consumer broadband joint venture in Europe with Hughes competitor ViaSat Inc. of Carlsbad, California, and uses ViaSat gear for Eutelsat’s existing European consumer broadband business.

Eutelsat and Facebook have leased the Ka-band payload on Israel-based Spacecom’s Amos-6 satellite, scheduled for launch in August aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Kaul said the contract with Eutelsat and Facebook calls for three Hughes-built gateway Earth stations, two data centers, a network management system and an initial order for an unspecified number of user terminals.

EchoStar’s European mobile satellite communications business has never been clear beyond the fact that the company is launching a 7,000-kilogram satellite to perform the service. Anders N. Johnson, president of EchoStar Satellite Services, provided a few details during the conference call.

“We’ve developed, with our colleagues over at [Hughes], an adaptation of a portable data terminal, which acts as an S-band connected Wi-Fi hotspot capable of supporting telephony products,” Johnson said. “We’ve got an inventory of units that will be available for immediate deployment across Europe for testing and then available through the wholesale channel through a pre-existing relationship that we have in Europe with a distributor.

“We’re also in discussions with a number of other people about using the product as a feature for other services, where the S-band satellite capacity would act as a gap-filler [where] terrestrial networks are incapable of supporting service at the moment that it’s needed,” Johnson said.